1 September 2011
As you undoubtedly know, I’ve been compiling lists of new words for each year of the past century. But novelist Mary Robinette Kowal has done something similar for words from 1815. She’s writing a period novel and wants to keep it free of linguistic anachronisms. Kowal describes her process:
I decided to create a Jane Austen word list, from the complete works of Jane Austen, and use that as my spellcheck dictionary. It flagged any word that she didn’t use, which allowed me to look it up to see if it existed. Sometimes the word did, but meant something different. [...] Once the word was flagged, I looked it up in the OED to double-check the meaning and the earliest citation. If the word didn’t work, then I used the OED’s historical thesaurus to find a period appropriate synonym. If that wasn’t yielding good results, I would also, sometimes, search in the complete works of Jane Austen to see how she referred to similar subjects.
In a few cases, she decided to keep anachronistic words for artistic or style reasons.
Kowal’s method is an excellent one. It is not doctrinaire, she makes exceptions where it is sensible to do so. She recognizes that words change in meaning. Presumably she shows some flexibility in the date, so a word that appears in the OED from 1817 is probably okay for use in an 1815 setting. Of course, her method will not flag a word that Austen used but has changed in meaning, so it’s not fail-safe. But no single method for eliminating anachronisms is going to be perfect. This is smart use of a dictionary.
Kowal’s blog post contains a list of words she pulled from her latest novel because they were anachronistic, and it contains a link to her Jane Austen word list. They are both well worth a peek.
(Hat tip to Languagehat)
