We are all
mimics. I’ve even found myself saying
“Oh, my God!” (though not, fortunately, “OMG”), which should be uttered only by
very young women. No, that’s not being
sexist.
Thus I can’t
blame new graduates with cloth ears for the deteriorating quality of 20th
century historical TV scripts, any more than I can blame young actresses
playing posh girls in Victorian dramas for saying “yee-ew” instead of “you” –
they get everything else right but they haven’t noticed the contemporary minor
vowel shift.
However, I can
blame the producers for not employing old fogeys like me to give the scripts a
once-over. They’re as meticulous as you
could reasonably expect over dress, décor, the skyline – even things I know a
bit about, like cars. (The cars are in
period; the choice of car is good – the staid old banker in a Rover 75, maybe,
the flash young executive in a Zephyr, the struggling dad in a Hillman Minx.)
But the US
invasion – which has been going on for a couple of hundred years but has
recently shifted up a gear (see, they say “shifted”, not “changed”) – is now
swamping English stories set in the 1950s and the 1980s alike.
Car terms I
notice especially: gear lever / gear shift; change gear / shift gear (American
“shift” serves as noun and verb; bonnet / hood; hood / top (“hood” is now
confusing); mudguard or wing / fender; windscreen / windshield; boot / trunk. The English usage is disappearing, as with racing
car / racecar, aeroplane / airplane. As streaming
and smartphone replace reading.
More glaring are
all those extraneous American prepositions that (to transition between my
themes) park up after words. Inside of
or outside of your house. Listen up.
Up what? Now I’ve mentioned it, please
collect examples.
And alien to me
are the prepositions that have vanished
before verbs. Write your Congressman,
just as you used to write to your MP. Appeal
instead of appeal against your lengthy sentence. The English usage is lost, the US sometimes
vague. Appeal for mercy.
To get back
where I started. I’m told that only
incorrigible pedants notice these things, but I think viewers are better than
that – they would notice, albeit subconsciously, that in-period language was
being used correctly, would absorb the feel of it and profit. After all, we appreciate the odd expression
that the scriptwriters have researched and casually dropped in – usually
appropriately – and we pick up on the sound of the background music or cunning
use of light or camera angle or whatever, even without analysing it.
Everyone tries hard to get the music right. To widen the argument, when I argue the same
for precision in language (or beauty or balance) I am told by modern linguists
that language changes and we should accept it without question. Is that a fair summary? But polish matters. If it matters that you hit the right note in a
song, it matters equally in speech. I
fear I may wish to return to the topic.
I feel the need to, as they say now, push
back (just as in the past I used to want to retaliate).
