Sunday, February 20, 2011

Words, words, anachronistic words

A crime novel I am reading now that was copyrighted in 2010 but set in 1953 includes the following:
"He had personally and with great deliberation planned a mission that even the most naive GI could see was a clusterfuck waiting to unfold."
The problem (other than that I've never liked the word clusterfuck) is that its occurence in 1953 appears to be an anachronism. Wiktionary says the word was "Reportedly coined by the hippie poet Ed Sanders in the 1960s." Another source traces the first usage to 1966.

What anachronisms have you come across in your reading? How badly did they bother you?
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(Here's a post I made a few months ago on how vocabulary contributes to a novel's sense of time and place.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

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