Anachronisms aren’t anachronisms
Roberta and I found 3 phrases we thought were anachronisms. Commenter latenac did the research and none of them are, in fact, anachronistic for 1960. This isn’t the first time we’ve discovered this sort of thing.
Here’s an interesting question: Why did they sound as if they were?
I think it’s because people in the movies and TV of 1960 didn’t talk much like the real people of 1960; certainly not to the extent that realistic dialogue exists (or attempts to exist, depending upon the skill of the writer) today.
This is one of Weiner’s themes, of course, that the people in Mad Men aren’t people in movies; they’re people who watch people in movies. 1960, I am so over you.
June 19th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
I think it could also be that our own ideas of what was going on in 1960 (well at least my ideas) are different than the reality. Like I always thought the Beat Poets were a 60’s thing but they aren’t they’re from the last 50’s. Reading Dawn Powell made me rethink my own timeline.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_Powell
If you haven’t read any of her stuff I highly recommend it as a portrait of NYC in the 1950’s. The Wicked Pavillion and The Golden Spur. Admittedly a little before Mad Men’s time but they both do explain a lot about the zeitgeist of that time.
June 19th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
I wasn’t familiar with Powell, but I’ve read Kerouac, and I was already clear that the Beat scene was a 50s scene, but its portrayal in movies was always entirely ridiculous.
June 19th, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Hey – just got here so I’m kind of too late for the previous post.
In 1960, WWII and Korea were still very fresh on everyone’s minds. Society was full of veterans and people who’d worked in a war-related capacity on the home front. Military terminology was quite common in many if not most households, as well as on both the TV and radio news reporting. My guess is it sounds out of place to our ears today because we are so very removed from our nation’s martial affairs by media censorship and lack of a military draft.
As for “intense” and “regroup”, yeah, I think it’s mostly because we haven’t seen those terms used frequently in other movies/TV from or about those times. I certainly recall “intense” from my earliest years (born 1963, if that helps). But I also think the added element of post- 1960’s contemporary “psychobabble” makes us think some terms are more recent than they actually are.
June 19th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Oops, hit “submit” too soon! To finish that thought about the modern emphasis on psychobabble, I just wanted to say that when I was a kid, “regroup” had a 50-50 chance of meaning something purely physical, as in gathering up the kids or meeting back someplace at a certain time. Since the 80’s it seems to have a 70% chance or better of meaning something emotional, and I think that could make it seem out of place in the 60’s to our ears.
Hell, remember when “closure” almost always referred to completing a business deal, or the like?
June 19th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
I think I commented on this before, yes? When Joan says, “1960 I am SO over you”, which you have mentioned here, this does strike me as an anachronism. It seems very 1990s, very “Friends” lingo, not to mention the intonation she uses is right out of Chandler Bing’s mouth. Is there any way to check that out?
June 19th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Yep, Rondi, we absolutely discussed this before (which is actually why I used the quote.
June 19th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
Rondi – your “So” comment brings back some not so pleasant memories. I went to school back east my first year of college – 1982 – the same year Frank Zappa released his album with the song “Valley Girl”. I cannot even begin to tell you how many of my fellow students were genuinely surprised that I did not speak like Frank Zappa’s daughter.
I was totally befuttled at first, but then I quickly realized most East Coasters simply had no concept of how geographically huge California is compare to their tiny states ( I was in New England), and that the San Fernando Valley did not encompass the entirely of the CA, not by a longshot. Most common question after why I didn’t sound like the Valley Girl song was did me and my friends go out to party in Hollywood on Friday and Saturday nights. I’d explain that LA was an 8 hour drive non-stop from SF, and they’d give me a confused, glassy stare, and then heads would explode.
Your “So” is on the Valspeak wiki page, and boy do I remember that! Check it out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valspeak
For my part of geographical misunderstanding, I was outraged when I saw my first local news TV weather forecast back east. They had a picture of 4 or more states up there on their weather map, and I was like, “What the fuck? Why don’t they show the LOCAL weather?” I soon realized that “these people” go through states the way we in CA go through counties, so that was their local weather map. Oops!
June 19th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Lipp sisters – when you get a chance, can someone please check the spam bucket? My last comment got ate. Thanks.
June 19th, 2008 at 6:36 pm
Deborah, Thanks! Yes, now I remember. I have early onset Alzheimer’s or something.
Oaktown Girl — Interesting! So it’s earlier than “Friends”. And now that you mention it, I remember Moon Unit Zappa and that song. I was in high school, I think.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
The anachronism that really jumped out at me was when Joan says “the medium is the message” to Peggy (in Babylon?) when Peggy wants to thank Freddy Rumsen for the opportunity to work on the Belle Jolie copy, and Joan says there’s no need, the men were very specific about wanting to communicate with Peggy through Joan, “the medium”.
“The medium is the message” is a phrase coined by Marshal McLuhan in _Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man_, published in 1964.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
June 19th, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Oak, nothing in spam.
Mellifera, that’s the best catch yet! That’s like, documented and everything! All the good stuff we haven’t done with our anachronism checks.
June 19th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Oak, nothing in spam.
Bizarre. As you can see from the time stamps, for some reason it took over one hour to show up. Maybe it took a side trip to 1960, or 1982 on the way to the comment thread. Or maybe it’s trying to tell us something – perhaps the medium really is the message?
Yeah, great catch indeed, mellifera. I never would have guessed that one as an anachronism. It just sounds so old to me, like something that’s been around since the early 20th century or thereabouts.
Donna – have you noticed that “So” never seems to die? It may wane from time to time, but never leaves for good. In fact, it seems to have gotten a fresh new bump in the past couple of years. (Or perhaps that’s just here in CA and among television writers?).
June 19th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
I actually knew the source of “the medium is the message,” I just would have guessed McLuhan to have been writing around 1959. That’s a really glaring error.
June 19th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
ex-grad student in tha house! glad to know my 1996 master’s thesis (largely related to mcluhan’s work) has come in handy…
y’all might enjoy (as i’m sure mr. weiner has) mcluhan’s _The Mechanical Bride:Folklore of Industrial Man_ (from 1951), a collection of short, snappy essays analyzing advertising text and imagery…
June 19th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
Oak, Deb, nothing must have been in the spam because I was simultaneously unspamming it. It’s posted.
I still can’t speak to ‘So’ in 1960, but as for transitioning from 80’s valley girl to 90’s Friends, I think that was the hook of Friends, and it goes back to an earlier discussion we had in here regarding the youthification of our culture. It’s hard for me to remember why it is I liked the Friend-speak back in its first season, but I think there was an understanding that ‘we’ (as portrayed by the Friends, but it was kind of all of us) were making it hip to deliberately speak young. It was making nostalgia hip.
Because it wasn’t just ‘So’. They would say, like, ‘Like’ all the time. And sometimes? They’d say ‘Duh’.
June 19th, 2008 at 9:51 pm
I would find it very interesting to see how the West versus East Coast lingo during the 1960’s evolved.
At some point the surfer/hollywood culture started to impact the general cultural message.
P.S. Oaktown Girl: Hello from San Francisco….
June 19th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Well hello, John! (or should I call you Daddy-O?)
And I agree with you, it would be very interesting to see that linguistic evolution.
I think it’s sad that our language across this country has become so homogenized. It makes me wonder if other industrialized countries are experiencing the same thing and for the same reasons.
June 20th, 2008 at 7:08 am
[...] on a word about hatsGlass Darkly on Curlers and rouge and steak in…Oaktown Girl on Anachronisms aren’t…Debra on Curlers and rouge and steak in…Roberta Lipp on Curlers and rouge and steak [...]
June 20th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Have you guys seen the NYT magazine profile on Mad Men? Among other things (it’s long and quite interesting), there’s a bit where Matt Weiner admits to two anachronisms:
“The only really big blunder I made that I was embarrassed about —” he started. “Well, there are two big blunders if you want to dwell on the negative, which is part of my personality.” He smiled. “The big blunder was that Joan quoted Marshall McLuhan. He had a bunch of books out in 1960, but not the one where he said, ‘The medium is the message.’ Unless she was in his class in Canada, she wouldn’t have known. He was probably using it already, but it was not in print.
“The second one was that Betty went to Bryn Mawr, and she talks about being in a sorority, and there are no sororities there. Bryn Mawr was very militant. I feel Betty was part of the shallow end of it because she grew up out there, that was a local school for her. She’s Main Line, King of Prussia or one of those towns. But Maggie Siff, who played Rachel Menken” — the Jewish department-store heiress — “went to Bryn Mawr, and she said that’s wrong.” He sighed. “You do what you can.”
They also mention that a (verbal) fight broke out over the phrase, “I am so over you”. The link is here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/magazine/22madmen-t.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all
June 20th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Should a writer write authentically to the period or what people perceive to be authentic? If a word or phrase is accurate, but it sounds off to a large percentage of viewers or readers, should it go?
June 20th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
S. Tarzan, that is an amazing article and it will take up the rest of my afternoon!
Glass, that’s an interesting question. I think in MM it should stay, because MM is really interesting in breaking the mythos and being real rather than what we imagine is real.
June 20th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I loved that article — at least the skim I did, and I’ll have to look at it again later.
I tend to agree Deborah, and don’t think writers should limit their choices if they don’t need to, but at the same time I hate being jarred out of a story to wonder if the writer screwed up.
June 20th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Over at the AMC site, John Scalzi defines the term he himself coined, “nerdgassing”:
Definition: The venting nerds emit when some (often minor) detail of a book/movie/TV show/comic book/etc. either conflicts with canon and/or handwaves through some suspect science.
Example One: “In the third show of the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data clearly says that the Glorithian flagship was constructed in orbit around that planet Norgar, but then in the 15th show of the sixth season, it’s said it was constructed in the Buterian space docks! How do you explain that, hmmm?…”
What would be the equivalent “Nerdgassing” word for Man Men fanatics?
June 20th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
Since Matt Weiner is an admitted obsessive fetishistic nut for accuracy, I think the rest of us are laid back by comparison. We can gas all we want.
June 20th, 2008 at 2:44 pm
GD, I think it depends on how jarring it is, and what the aim of inclusion is. F’r instance, I recall reading somewhere that before World War II, Americans used to salute the flag during the Pledge of Allegiance with a straight-armed Roman-style salute. (Actually, here’s a picture.) Since it looks a lot like the salute you would associate with ‘Heil Hitler’, it was discontinued during the war; and even today I think it’s too potent an image to be thrown into a period movie without careful thought about what purpose it serves.