Words from the Past and in the Future

Annamaria on Monday

Eventually, all novels become historical fiction.

I have taught myself not to smirk when I hear people tell me they dislike historical fiction, but when asked if they enjoy the great masterpieces of English literature, they say yes. Dickens? "Yes! I love him."  Mark Twain? "Oh, yes!"  Jane Austen? "My absolute favorite!"

If they, as I do, enjoy such works, then they are reading historical fiction.  No?  And to so so, they have had to learn what certain words meant in the past, meanings the words no longer carry,

Let's take Austen, as a for instance.  She uses the word "stupid." But to her, it did not carry the pejorative meaning it does today.  To Jane, a "stupid" person had nothing to say, not because of lack of intelligence, but lack of an opinion, or willingness to share an opinion or anything interesting to speak about.

Historical novelists writing about the past for contemporary audiences have to make choices when it comes to word usage.  For me, what I try to do is to use language in a way that readers will feel themselves iπ the past, without stymieing them with words they know not at all. "Untoward," for instance, is no longer in common use, but it can -in context - express an idea but do so in an old fashioned way.  Sometimes, finding the apt word is fun.  As in using "oldfangled," an out-of-date word to describes an out-of-date technology.

There are words I know from my research into times past that I don't foist on 21at Century readers.  Here are a few and what they mean:

Chiffarobe

My grandmother had one

Antimacassar

Macassar Oil

Then there are words past and present that change depending on where the story is set.  For instance, the word for diagonally or obliquely positioned was "catty-corner" in my native New Jersey, but is "kitty-corner" in a lot of the US, "caddy-corner" in some places, and "catawanpus" is parts of the Midwest and South .

In most of the English-speaking world people

 "stand in line" but here in NY-NJ, we "stand

 on line."

Regionalisms like these  are probably getting

 lost in the internet shuffle, but some of them,

 I imagine, are hanging on. For instance...

This might be called "pop," soda" or "tonic"

And this might be called a "turnpike" or a "freeway" or a

 "highway."

This might be called a "hero" or a "hoagie"or a "grinder"

 or a "subway" or a "sub." . 

I wonder if the historical novelist's of the future will get them right.  Or if anyone will know.  Or care.