It is very important that the language in your novel reflects the time and place in which the story is set.
For example, my story is set in Italy. My characters would never “ride shotgun”, a term coined in US in the early 1900s referring to riding alongside the driver with a shotgun to gun bandits.
Do your research! A free tool that I found to be very useful is Ngram Viewer.
You can type any word and see when it started appearing in books. For example…one of my characters was going to say “gazillion” (I write YA) in 1994. Was “gazillion” used back then?
And the answer is…YES! It started trending in 1988 and was quite popular in 1994.
Enjoy ^_^
This is really important, especially because language can change in very unexpected ways.
For example, did you know that before 1986 people never said “I need to”?Instead, they were far more likely to say “I ought to”, “I have to”, “I must”, or “I should”.
Don’t believe me?
Anyway, most people won’t notice subtle changes like that. But your reader will notice and be confused when characters in your medieval world use metaphors involving railroads and rockets.
One of the things you can do besides use Google Ngrams is to read books or watch movies written in the time period you want to set your story. The key here is that they can’t just be set in that time period, they have to have been made in that time period.
Also, there’s a Lexicon Valley episode on this very topic which I highly recommend. It’s called Capturing the Past.
SEE ALSO Etymonline. Word origins and when they’re first recorded. So, say I wanted to find out when a “coffee break” became a thing – around the 1950s, as seen in magazine adverts – or characters might talk about more genrallly “taking a break” from the 1860s…
On this day, 11 July 2002, German socialist and French resistance fighter Irene Bernard died aged 94. An office clerk and mother of three, she lived in Saarland, which was independent of Germany in the early days of Nazi rule, and became home to many Germans fleeing the regime. There she and her husband, Leander, assisted refugees. When Saarland was annexed by the German Reich in 1935, the Bernards fled to France to escape the Gestapo. There, they kept up their anti-fascist activities and helped volunteers on their way to fight general Franco’s nationalists in the Spanish civil war. When the Wehrmacht occupied southern France in 1942, Irene joined Travail Antifasciste Allemand, a combat unit of the French resistance consisting of thousands of mostly German speakers. She later went underground, fought with the National Committee for Free Germany and gathered military intelligence. After the war, Bernard took care of wounded German soldiers who were prisoners of war. Later she returned to Saarland and became involved with women’s and anti-war movements, and remained involved with anti-fascism and advocating for victims of Nazism. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1164992763685872/?type=3
Up now on my eBay! Classic indie comics from 2002! Jingle Belle Winter Wingding by Paul Dini, Chynna Clugston and Spike Brandt! Also up for grabs: my superheroine comic collection (70’s-80’s stuff), random Radio Comix books and various indie comics! My house is super small, and I am still selling off thirty years’ worth of collectibles to raise money for ongoing back taxes & various upcoming large expenses, so every little bit helps. Thanks for looking & sharing!
