[Ads-l] Mercy Street

[Jonathan Lighter]

The producers of the PBS Civil War soap opera "Mercy Street" explain on
screen that period authenticity was extremely important to them, since
people expect it from PBS.

Though the style of the period dialogue is more or less believable (maybe
it's a little *too* stilted), the writers betray their lexical naivete'
through the use of the following terms, some of which caused my wife to LOL:

Wounded soldiers receive "care packages" from home.

The recently invented hypodermic syringe is described as a "delivery
system" for morphine.

John Wilkes Booth calls his (quite fictitious) 1862 plot to blow Lincoln
sky high "Operation Log Cabin."

A nurse borrows honey for tea from the doctor's "private stash."

If you don't recognize these turns of phrase as blatant anachronisms, you
could be......a whippersnapper.

JL



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org