obscene words from deadwood

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 04:28:47PM -0600, Dennis Baron wrote:
> Geoff, you could tell David Bianculli this:
>
> It's great to get pissed off at imprecise claims to accuracy
>on the part of scriptwriters, but what degree of accuracy can
>we realistically demand from fiction, anyway?

[...]

Dennis, I do think that the issue of linguistic accuracy in
films or other works of fiction is an interesting one, and I
agree that in many cases we shouldn't expect accuracy at
all. An impression of accuracy is much more important, even
if it's completely inaccurate in reality--cf. an insistence
on using RP for Shakespeare when modern American English is
probably closer to how things sounded (help me out here, Dale),
or even using modern Scots actors to represent someone speaking
Gaelic--might as well give 'em a French accent.

I know this is a subject of interest to the original-instruments
crowd in early music, too.

But anyway my point is that even if we accept the fiction in
fiction, there are these cases when the fiction is explicity
freighted with claims to its extreme accuracy in particular
areas--the re-weaving of the Titanic's carpets is one
example. So if the producers of this show said, "We're doing a
cowboy show, and you will think it's authentic because there
are tumbleweeds and cowboy hats and people saying "howdy"
a lot," that's one thing. But if they said, "We dug up the
corpse of Bill Hickok so we could see the style of the
suit he buried him in, and we spoke to botanical historians
to make sure the kind of tumbleweeds are the kind that would
have been there, but we're still going to have people saying
"cowpoke" because that's what the viewers expect, even though
the term really dates from the 1920s", well, that's bad. And
really bad would be if they said "We're really accurate with
language, so we're putting in all sorts of authentic stuff
like "cowpoke", and I know it's authentic because it sounds
authentic". And that seems to be what's happening here.

Jesse Sheidlower