How They Spoke
Jan. 15th, 2026 08:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo Judy is reading a time travel story which has modern day people going back to 1914- and it's annoying her that the dialogue the author gives his Georgians to speak feels really "off".
Yeah, well, but how did people speak in 1914? What's our evidence?
It's almost entirely literary. And literary dialogue has been cleaned up, tidied up, rendered, well, literary. And, anyway, we can't know whether any particular writer had a good ear for dialogue or not.
Did anyone ever speak like Oscar Wilde's people- except, perhaps, Oscar himself? Was the speech of Irish peasants half as as colourful as the stuff Synge puts in their mouths? Going back a bit further, did Dickens's Cockneys really transpose their "v"s and "w"s and if so when did they stop?
And how did people cuss during the Great War? Someone a while back was protesting that is was wildly anachronistic to have soldiers saying "fuck" in the movie 1917- and it piqued my interest, so I dug. Turns out they certainly did- all the fucking time- only you wouldn't know it from most of the contemporary novels, memoirs and plays.
Accuracy bows before good manners. It does in our time too. Stick a microphone in front of someone's face and they'll start minding their "p"s and "q"s. There's a lot more casual casual racism (the taboo of our times) in the speech of the streets than shows up in the record that will be available to our grand kids....
Yeah, well, but how did people speak in 1914? What's our evidence?
It's almost entirely literary. And literary dialogue has been cleaned up, tidied up, rendered, well, literary. And, anyway, we can't know whether any particular writer had a good ear for dialogue or not.
Did anyone ever speak like Oscar Wilde's people- except, perhaps, Oscar himself? Was the speech of Irish peasants half as as colourful as the stuff Synge puts in their mouths? Going back a bit further, did Dickens's Cockneys really transpose their "v"s and "w"s and if so when did they stop?
And how did people cuss during the Great War? Someone a while back was protesting that is was wildly anachronistic to have soldiers saying "fuck" in the movie 1917- and it piqued my interest, so I dug. Turns out they certainly did- all the fucking time- only you wouldn't know it from most of the contemporary novels, memoirs and plays.
Accuracy bows before good manners. It does in our time too. Stick a microphone in front of someone's face and they'll start minding their "p"s and "q"s. There's a lot more casual casual racism (the taboo of our times) in the speech of the streets than shows up in the record that will be available to our grand kids....
