Old Time Vocabulary

 

Slang and even formal vocabulary change over time. As a writer of historical fiction, my challenge is to stay true to the period without confusing my readers with words they define differently.

Some slang is practically timeless. “Okay” has been around since at least 1840, and “kids,” as in little children, was in use as long ago as the seventeenth century. Since my characters and my readers have the same understanding as to the meaning of these words, I don’t have to think twice about including them in a manuscript.

Other words aren’t as clear. I ask my middle-grade beta readers whether there are any words they didn’t know and couldn’t figure out from the context. When I got back the evaluation forms for a novel set in 1925, one fourth grader included “fast” on that list. At first, I was confused. Who doesn’t know what that word means? But when I searched the manuscript looking for it, I came across a scene where my protagonist asks her mother if she can get her hair bobbed and the mother responds that short hair makes women look fast. Now I understood the beta reader’s comment, and I found a way to rewrite the scene using language today’s children are more likely to know.

Then there are the slang words that need careful handling. Historically the word “gay” meant cheerful or merry, and all of my characters would have understood it that way. Defined that way, it was in frequent use during the periods covered by my novels, so avoiding it seems a little stilted. But because my readers would give it a different meaning, “gay” doesn’t occur in any of my middle-grade manuscripts.

Then there is the question of when a particular slang word entered the American vocabulary. Would my character have used a particular word at the time of the story? Fortunately, about two years ago I found a used copy of the 3^rd edition of the Dictionary of American Slang by Chapman and Kipfer. If I look up a word, that dictionary may tell me whether it was in use at the time. If it doesn’t have dates, or if the word is not included, then I’ll do an Internet search for “[word] origin.” And if I still can’t figure out when it became popular, I won’t use it.

Writing historical fiction is always a challenge.

But it’s rewarding to get it right.

__________

For more on this subject, you can read my January 25, 2021 and February 1, 2021 blog posts.