anachronism watch

[Amy West]

On 5/5/12 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
> Date:    Fri, 4 May 2012 20:39:40 -0400
> From:    Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject: anachronism watch
>
> I am trying out an audiobook of_A Death at Pemberley_, a recent sequel to_Pride and Prejudice_  by that redoubtable dean of English mystery writers P. D. James.  The book is set in 1803, five years after Darcy has wed Elizabeth Bennet, and the narrative is clearly intended to be very much in the style of Austen. It succeeds to some extent, but it's always interesting to pick up on and then confirm apparent anachronisms of usage or style.
Ben Zimmer beat you to it: Boston Globe column and Visual Thesaurus
columns on it.

I heard "cramp my style" in the recently aired Little Dorrit
dramatization on PBS and that struck me as too modern. OED has a
bracketed 1819 use from Charles Lamb's letters that wasn't pub'd until
1935, but nothing else until 1917. So, now I have to go and look at
Little Dorrit and see if Dickens really used it or if it was Andrew
Davies, the screen writer.

---Amy West

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