{"id":1986,"date":"2015-08-11T10:15:04","date_gmt":"2015-08-11T16:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/?p=1986"},"modified":"2020-11-25T10:58:16","modified_gmt":"2020-11-25T16:58:16","slug":"anachronisms-time-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/definitions\/anachronisms-time-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Anachronisms: Time Out!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Shakespeare typing Hamlet<\/em>. JFK on a cellphone. Elvis using Twitter. Each is an anachronism<\/em>, the technical term for a chronological blunder.<\/p>\n

Many years ago my family took me to see Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra<\/em>. As young as I was, I gave up on the movie in utter disgust when Cleopatra winked at Caesar. I didn\u2019t care that the filmmakers were having a little fun with their presumably sophisticated audience. To me, it was a deal breaker.<\/p>\n

In HBO\u2019s Boardwalk Empire<\/em>, set in Atlantic City during Prohibition, loving care and great expense went into the costumes and the lavish set design. So I was jolted when, in the first episode\u2014directed by Martin Scorsese no less\u2014a showgirl shrieks, \u201cNo way!\u201d My Partridge Dictionary of Slang<\/em> says that no way<\/em> first appeared in 1968.<\/p>\n

In Mail Order Bride<\/em>, a western set in 19th century Wyoming, a character says, \u201cShe couldn\u2019t take the lifestyle.\u201d The Oxford English Dictionary<\/em> says life-style<\/em> was coined in 1929. That surprised me, because I would have sworn that lifestyle<\/em> didn\u2019t show up until the 1960s.<\/p>\n

So beware what you call an anachronism\u2014you might get taken down a peg, as I was by the 1933 film A Man\u2019s Castle<\/em>, when Spencer Tracy says, \u201cI\u2019m hip to all the panhandling routines.\u201d Really? He was \u201chip\u201d back in 1933? I\u2019d have lost that bet.<\/p>\n

I was also put in my place by the great AMC series Mad Men<\/em> when a character in the 1960s said \u201csynchronicity,\u201d a word that became trendy with the popular culture in the eighties. But it turns out synchronicity<\/em> goes back to the fifties.<\/p>\n

The creator of Mad Men<\/em>, Matthew Weiner, was meticulous in his replication of sixties vernacular. Good for him, because a lot of watchdogs were paying close attention. I\u2019ve read that Weiner was grilled about the show\u2019s use of self-worth<\/em>, regroup<\/em>, and recon<\/em>, but like synchronicity<\/em>, those terms were around back then. \u201cWhen in doubt,\u201d Weiner said, \u201cI don\u2019t use it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not all the quibbles were false alarms. Even an artist as committed as Weiner is going to slip up, as when he had someone say, \u201cYou have to be on the same page as him.\u201d On the same page<\/em>, I understand, didn\u2019t enter the language until the late seventies.<\/p>\n

Other Mad Men<\/em> lines I had doubts about include \u201cI\u2019m a glass-half-full kind of girl\u201d and \u201cpush back.\u201d These both sound decidedly post-sixties. Instead of “glass-half-full kind of girl,” why not use an expression more typical of the period, like \u201cI\u2019m a cockeyed optimist\u201d? Same with\u00a0\u201cpush back.\u201d Why use a term that\u2019s overused by politicians and pundits in 2015 when any number of hardy perennials (“oppose,” “resist,” “defy”) are readily available? If a phrase sounds too current, it risks spoiling the illusion.<\/p>\n

And even if you could prove to me that winking goes all the way back to ancient Egypt, it still didn\u2019t work in Cleopatra<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u2014Tom Stern<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shakespeare typing Hamlet. JFK on a cellphone. Elvis using Twitter. Each is an anachronism, the technical term for a chronological blunder. Many years ago my family took me to see Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra. As young as I was, I gave up on the movie in utter disgust when Cleopatra winked at Caesar. I didn\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,12,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-definitions","category-effective-writing","category-proofreading"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1986"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1986\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}