anachronism watch

[Amy West]

On 5/5/12 9:51 AM, Amy West wrote:
>
> 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.
And a quick and dirty search of Little Dorrit in GoogleBooks reveals
that "cramp [one's] style" ain't in there, so it was Davies messing
around. Sigh.

---Amy West

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