Reply to Unrealistic things in movies and tv shows that drive you crazy

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I get hung up on historical dramas, where they reference ideas that hadn’t yet come into existence in that time period. Like a show that takes place in the time of Jesus or someone says just a second or just a minute — since clocks weren’t invented  until the middle ages so they didn’t have seconds and minutes. They do things like this a lot in that Viking show where for example, one of the characters talks about something as being very risky or having bad odds or something. The science of probability was only created in the 1700s, so Vikings would not have been familiar with concepts like risk or odds. My husband says this weird quirk  of mine tends to ruin a lot of TV watching and I’m the only person who worries about things like this.[/quote]

Love this! I only notice something similar in terms of recent idioms*, but that’s so smart about the bigger ideas behind language use.

* Like in the recent Boston Strangler movie: Were they REALLY saying “don’t get it twisted” in the 1950s? Sometimes I look up a term and am surprised, but this one I realllly doubt. [/quote]

Yes to both you, PP, and the person to whom you're responding, re: characters saying things which are, in a word, anachronistic either in concepts or in language!

I don't mind it at all in some productions when it's done consciously. My college student was just in a play that has a historical setting but intentionally uses modern language, and that was just fine, as it was on purpose and had a point to it. But the anachronistic speech grates when it's clearly just sloppy, lazy writing that doesn't even bother to try to make people sound somewhat "of their time." Things like using slang that sounds far too modern, like your example.

Of course there have to be some compromises for clarity; we likely coudln't fully understand the dialogue if some period pieces tried to use [i]truly[/i] authentic vocabulary spoken in period accents. But I just appreciate so much when scripts and acting/directing choices make an effort, within bounds of comprehensibility.

A few years back we watched the series "Ripper Street" and I thought that it did one of the best jobs I'd seen, of a show where dialogue sounded as if the characters were all actually living in their period (the 1890s) not today. [/quote]

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