Do you ever read a regency romance and come across a word that sounds too modern for Georgian England? It’s possible that those modern-sounding words are actually regency-setting appropriate. Check out my previous posts here and here about the “Tiffany Problem” in historical fiction and to see some words that might sound modern but were actually in use in Austen’s day.
I use Google’s Ngram and the Online Etymological Dictionary along with primary sources in Google books to determine if a word was in use—and in use in the same way—when I set my books.
Today I have two phrases and two words. In a book out next year, I wanted to have a character say that her older and more adorable child might steal another child's thunder and I needed a way to get the same idea across. Lucky for me, it turns out that idiom was in use for a hundred years before I needed a character to say it.
John Dennis was a playwright who developed a thunder machine for his 1709 play Appius and Virginia. The play was a flop and closed and later Dennis discovered his device in use without his permission at a performance of Macbeth. He allegedly said, ‘That is my thunder by God; the villains will play my thunder, but not my plays.’ This became the idiom ‘steal my thunder’.
In the same book, a character is reluctant to live under someone's thumb. Today the term under the thumb is used in a derogatory manner to describe a partner's overbearing control. I thought I'd have to make the analogy in a different way until I learned the phrase comes from falconry and was already an idiom in the early eighteenth century. To be under the thumb comes from the action of a falconer holding the leash of the hawk under their thumb to maintain a tight control of the bird.
This next word is from the same book. I wanted to use fuel, and this took a while to search for. Of course it was in use as in material for burning, but I wanted to use it in a figurative way.
Elizabeth wished she could show how glad she was to see him, but that would only fuel Charlotte’s presumptions.
It's likely to have been understood in this context, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't be close enough to fit my story set in 1811. But the Online Etymological Dictionary has fuel, the verb meaning "feed or furnish with fuel," with both a literal and figurative meaning since the 1590s!
The last word is 'racket' and I've used this one in two different contexts in two different books—and both times I wasn't sure if it would work. The first use was in Nine Ladies when Darcy is at a night club, and not having a very good time.
The music was a racket with a fast beat. Elizabeth and her friends were pulled into a small group of women around the same age who appeared to be either very happy or very drunk; he could not tell at so great a distance.
It turned out that racket meaning a "loud, disorderly, confusing noise," is from the 1560s. But I wanted to use it in Rising Courage too, although in a different context. Elizabeth needed to realize what the brandy smuggling scheme was about and how it worked. In the book, it dawns on her and she calls it a racket. I thought I'd need another short, assertive word for her to use, but racket meant "dishonest activity" in 1785, well in time for Elizabeth to use it when she and Darcy are kidnapped by a smuggling gang in 1812.
Do certain words ever pull you out of a story because you think they don't sound "regency" enough? It's possible those idioms or words would have been well understood by someone living in Austen's day.
It is fun when reading & I come across something that makes me wonder if it is correct or not or just curious about the word that I quickly search it up and it is fun to find that many words are actually older than I thought. ~ Glory