Research with care, my friends.

Lakey

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I highly recommend this delightful Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/DanaSchwartzzz/status/1290099410299305984

In summary: Someone reading a historical novel by an acclaimed author noticed some odd ingredients in character's description of making dye. Turns out the ingredients are from a video game; at some time* if you Googled ingredients for dyeing clothes red, you got a list of ingredients from the video game as a top result. Oops!

ob-RYFW, the author who made the error did turn up in the thread and was very gracious about it. Honestly I live in fear of making a blunder like this. It's part of the reason I am verrrry hesitant to read or watch other people's modern recreations of the time period I write in. All of my research goes into a hopper in my brain, from whence I pull out facts and details and period-sounding turns of phrase; the last thing I want is for someone else's anachronisms to get in there along with the real stuff.

:e2coffee:

* No longer true; now the first result is a Verge story on the same thing: https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2020/...es-of-wisdom-john-boyne-google-search-results
 
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Kat M

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Oh. My goodness. That's hilarious.

I love how he says he's just going to keep it . . . it's like this little Easter egg.
---
If I may share a personal anecdote . . . in middle school, I was supposed to make an insect collection and label the insects. Well, I dutifully went out and collected insects, but I was at a loss to identify them as I lived overseas at the time without access to field guides in English.

So, I had to use the internet. I did not know how to use the internet. One very common "insect" was a type of spider (I did not know how to science either) about two inches long with a colorful yellow abdomen. I Googled "big yellow spider [country name]" and found a picture on someone's travel blog labeled "Big-a*sed spider." A sheltered child, I figured it had been named for a donkey and dutifully copied the name down. And turned it in.
 

Chris P

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That's the problem with too much information out there: too much information! And lol, Kat! Fun story.

Not immediately for a project, but in looking at old pictures of the National Mall in DC I came across one littered with hundreds of downed trees. I had seen other pictures with a heavily treed Mall, and later pics with an open Mall, and knew Dutch elm disease had come through. The downed trees pic must have been during the removal of all the diseased and dead trees. Cool bit of history! Not quite. I noticed a flaw in one part of the pic had showed up in another...minus the downed trees. Turned out the downed trees pic was doctored for someone's dystopian post apocalyptic blog story. Intersection of competently done photoshop and willing to believe viewer.
 
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angeliz2k

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Oh no! That's kind of hilarious. Mistakes happen, though. We're never going to be able to avoid all of them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to avoid all of them...

My little story (which I've probably told before): I was researching for my ms about the real brothers who inspired Peter Pan, and in my source material it said that when JM Barrie and the boys were on holiday in Scotland, one of Barrie's colleagues (not a colleague he liked much) came to visit and brought his wife and daughter. The book goes on to say that George (who was 19 at the time) had a fling with "Betty". I naturally assumed that the colleague was about Barrie's age and that the daughter was roughly George's age, so I naturally assumed that Betty was the colleague's daughter. I wrote two whole damn scenes with that assumption in mind. Well, guess what? Turns out Barrie's colleague was about Barrie's age, but he had a much younger wife (mid-20s). So George was having a fling with the *wife*, not the daughter. When I realized this, I laughed my ass off for several minutes. George, you dog! Then I went back and reworked those scenes.
 
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Lakey

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Well if I have to confess my own errors, I'm fortunate in that I haven't made any horrendous ones so far (that I know of) and I've had so little published that there's no chance of public embarrassment beyond AW. Most of the ones I've caught myself have been colloquialisms in dialogue that weren't yet in the vernacular at the time my stories take place. "It's not my first rodeo," I wanted one character to say, which a little research showed wasn't current until the 1990s! Another time I had a character use the word "deniability," which wasn't common until -- go figure -- the Vietnam era.

Some subtler ones I've struggled with was wanting a character to use the phrase "tea and sympathy," which wouldn't have had the connotations she used it with until at least 1953, when the play by that name opened on Broadway, and really probably not until the Hollywood adaptation came out in 1956, far too late. Some of you here, if I recall, said I should go ahead and use it and not worry about errors of a year or two; I admit it doesn't sit right with me. Similarly, I also have a character thinking about "the diary of that poor little Dutch girl" -- Anne Frank's diary was published in English in 1952; this worked fine for my original unspecific early-50s setting. I've since moved the timeline of my book specifically back to 1950, to catch some Lavender Scare issues more squarely, which means I'm going to have to change that line.

I'm sure I've made all kinds of errors, though, that have yet to be caught!

:e2coffee:
 
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Lil

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A great way to find out when words or phrases became popular is Google Ngram Viewer. But be sure to check to citations to make sure the word or phrase you want to use means what you want it to mean at that time.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/
 
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Lakey

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Green’s Dictionary of Slang is another useful resource (a really interesting resource; be prepared to waste half an hour browsing around after you look anything up!).

:e2coffee:
 
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frimble3

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Well if I have to confess my own errors, I'm fortunate in that I haven't made any horrendous ones so far (that I know of) and I've had so little published that there's no chance of public embarrassment beyond AW. Most of the ones I've caught myself have been colloquialisms in dialogue that weren't yet in the vernacular at the time my stories take place. "It's not my first rodeo," I wanted one character to say, which a little research showed wasn't current until the 1990s! Another time I had a character use the word "deniability," which wasn't common until -- go figure -- the Vietnam era.

Some subtler ones I've struggled with was wanting a character to use the phrase "tea and sympathy," which wouldn't have had the connotations she used it with until at least 1953, when the play by that name opened on Broadway, and really probably not until the Hollywood adaptation came out in 1956, far too late. Some of you here, if I recall, said I should go ahead and use it and not worry about errors of a year or two; I admit it doesn't sit right with me. Similarly, I also have a character thinking about "the diary of that poor little Dutch girl" -- Anne Frank's diary was published in English in 1952; this worked fine for my original unspecific early-50s setting. I've since moved the timeline of my book specifically back to 1950, to catch some Lavender Scare issues more squarely, which means I'm going to have to change that line.

I'm sure I've made all kinds of errors, though, that have yet to be caught!

:e2coffee:
Is "the diary of that poor little Dutch girl" mentioned in more that those general terms? Because although the English version was published in 1952, it was originally published in Dutch in 1947. (6 editions, so I imagine it was well-known) In 1950 it was published in German and French. I don't know who your character is, but she might know about it. Just as vaguely as she says it 'that book about that Dutch girl'.
 

L.C. Blackwell

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The internet isn't the only dangerous place for finding historical goofs. You really, really have to be careful about printed Victorian sources talking about the 18th century or earlier. Put this way: there's a tendency not to let the truth get in the way of a good story. I'm thinking of the "Hawkhurst Genge" and the so-called Battle of Goudhurst.
 

angeliz2k

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I'll also mention www.etymonline.com. I use it quite frequently. Dictionary.com actually gives pretty decent etymological info, but etymonline is a bit more thorough. Helps me figure out if a certain meaning of a word was used at a certain time. Often, it wasn't.

LC Blackwell, that's one reason I think it's important to look at modern scholarship on your topic. You need to know what people have discovered recently. Older sources and even primary sources might be proved wrong. Also, how we look at history has changed massively, and you don't want to be presenting the history through a lens that is outdated.
 

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If I may share a personal anecdote . . . in middle school, I was supposed to make an insect collection and label the insects. Well, I dutifully went out and collected insects, but I was at a loss to identify them as I lived overseas at the time without access to field guides in English.

So, I had to use the internet. I did not know how to use the internet. One very common "insect" was a type of spider (I did not know how to science either) about two inches long with a colorful yellow abdomen. I Googled "big yellow spider [country name]" and found a picture on someone's travel blog labeled "Big-a*sed spider." A sheltered child, I figured it had been named for a donkey and dutifully copied the name down. And turned it in.

I love this! My partner has a PhD in Veterinary Medicine, with a specialty in diseases spread through insects, so she knows every bug backwards and forwards. She also teaches first-year university students, and has plenty of 'cut & paste' stories to tell, and she thought this was pretty funny. I'm sure she'll share it to maybe/hopefully get her students to ref and cross ref their sources. Most (nearly all) of her students have no idea how to use a library, or a book's glossary to find pertinent info. A lost art. My guess is that this is not the only big-assed spider story out there!

Very nice anecdote, thanks for sharing it.
 
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Helix

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I put up some info about a short-range endemic snail because there wasn't much available online...and the frivolous common name I had applied to it became enshrined in not one but two Parks & Wildlife management plans.
 
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TellMeAStory

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LC Blackwell, that's one reason I think it's important to look at modern scholarship on your topic. You need to know what people have discovered recently. Older sources and even primary sources might be proved wrong. Also, how we look at history has changed massively, and you don't want to be presenting the history through a lens that is outdated.

Actually, I find the primary sources that have later been proved wrong to be highly useful. After Pearl Harbor, the Oakland Tribune published a map that showed Japanese bombers headed straight for the San Francisco Bay Area. So it was wrong, but people at that time and place believed it, and chaos ensued. If the writer of historical fiction relied on modern scholarship alone, some very useful material would get overlooked.
 

angeliz2k

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Actually, I find the primary sources that have later been proved wrong to be highly useful. After Pearl Harbor, the Oakland Tribune published a map that showed Japanese bombers headed straight for the San Francisco Bay Area. So it was wrong, but people at that time and place believed it, and chaos ensued. If the writer of historical fiction relied on modern scholarship alone, some very useful material would get overlooked.

I guess it wasn't 100% clear, but I certainly didn't mean we should rely on only secondary/more recent sources. But it is important to know what has been learned about the topic since the events in question. Basically, I'm talking about historiography.
 

benbenberi

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It's certainly the case that what people at the time believe is happening and what historians can later discover was really happening are often very different things. (And the historical understanding can change radically with new evidence and new interpretations of old evidence.) As fiction writers it's generally important to know both, even though the characters don't share our perspective.
 
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Whiteout

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This is really tough because sometimes secondary information is more accurate and yet sometimes not.

A big trend now is to rewrite history so that something is new and novel so that the person doing the notations is credited with a “new” discovery. They can do that because as people pass on, there is not real life experience to challenge someone’s assertion of what happened.

For instance I had a teacher that claimed this and that happened at the battle of bunker hill but years later I found my ancestors real life account of that battle and my teacher was wrong. The original version was right as evidenced by someone who was there.
 
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DigitalScript

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Turns out the ingredients are from a video game; at some time* if you Googled ingredients for dyeing clothes red, you got a list of ingredients from the video game as a top result. Oops!

Hehehehe. I wouldn't worry about making modern blunders. Honestly, the amount of times this sort of thing happens, whether you know it or not, is staggering. It reminds me of this one time I translated and recited an exorcism for (a film).

I have an MA in Classics - Late Antiquity with almost a decade of Latin under my belt. The screen writer, via a third party, sent me a 'Roman Catholic exorcism' to record so that they could teach their actors how to recite it. This was it:

"... Omnis fallaciae, libera nos,
dominates. Exorcizamus you omnis immundus spiritus
Omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio, Infernalis adversarii,
omnis legio, Omnis and congregatio secta diabolica."

It still makes me laugh. Some writer clearly did a quick google search for the exorcism, completely oblivious to what was actually written. The singular God of Catholicism had been replaced by multiple 'dominates,' and 'Exorcizamus you' instead of 'Exorcisamus te' just kills me. Clearly someone inserted the English 'you' to sabotage the incantation, as if the devil weren't smart enough to figure that out, and mangled the grammar intentionally or not.

Good times.
 
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Svala Bjornsdottir

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It's the spoken language thing that kills me. Not necessarily phrases (although those too). At what point do you forgive yourself anachronisms in terms of language for translatability in the read. There's a particular word I'm thinking of. Would the Vikings have used it in the context I have them use it? No. Would they have had some other word that worked in the same way? yes! i'd be nuts to think they didn't, but here's where I can't quite get my head straight... if lost on the reader what is the point in using the more historically accurate word? Is it enough to argue that the characters would have had a variant of this (modern) word, used for the same contextual purpose, that would land the same way in dialogue? What I'm doing after all is translating dialogue as part of a story. Next I think, even the words I do use, which I know were not used in that way back then, if you trace the root of them, they are invariably Ancient Germanic in origin or have their roots in a Latin form and at the very least would have existed. Then I think 'no no no, the word wouldn't have been used like that then it's as simple as that!' It makes me want to cry. Or drink. Or cry into my drink.
 
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Catriona Grace

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The singular God of Catholicism had been replaced by multiple 'dominates,' and 'Exorcizamus you' instead of 'Exorcisamus te' just kills me.

:LOL: I don't have ten years of Latin under my belt or anywhere else, but after singing in choirs for decades, certain Latin words and phrases are familiar. Libera nos, dominates... I'm dyin' here. The implications are fascinating, and probably belong in the erotica subforum.
 

Tocotin

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At what point do you forgive yourself anachronisms in terms of language for translatability in the read. There's a particular word I'm thinking of. Would the Vikings have used it in the context I have them use it? No. Would they have had some other word that worked in the same way? yes! i'd be nuts to think they didn't, but here's where I can't quite get my head straight...
When I'm doing my best to avoid anachronisms, my aim is not historical accuracy, but rather the illusion of historical accuracy. I want to show the readers the setting I love. I want the readers to be able to imagine that they are there, in the marketplace of that particular little town or in the ballroom or what have you, right beside the characters, and ready to understand their way of seeing the world. If there is a risk that a word or a phrase might shatter the illusion, I won't use it. Accuracy or not, it's just not worth it if it's not helpful in building the illusion.

if lost on the reader what is the point in using the more historically accurate word? Is it enough to argue that the characters would have had a variant of this (modern) word, used for the same contextual purpose, that would land the same way in dialogue?
But you don't know whether something is really, truly lost on the reader or not. There will be at least one person somewhere who would know that historically accurate word, and appreciate you using it. Don't underestimate your readers, especially if you are writing historical fiction.

Good luck!

:troll
 
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Chris P

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It's the spoken language thing that kills me. Not necessarily phrases (although those too). At what point do you forgive yourself anachronisms in terms of language for translatability in the read. There's a particular word I'm thinking of. Would the Vikings have used it in the context I have them use it? No. Would they have had some other word that worked in the same way? yes! i'd be nuts to think they didn't, but here's where I can't quite get my head straight... if lost on the reader what is the point in using the more historically accurate word? Is it enough to argue that the characters would have had a variant of this (modern) word, used for the same contextual purpose, that would land the same way in dialogue? What I'm doing after all is translating dialogue as part of a story. Next I think, even the words I do use, which I know were not used in that way back then, if you trace the root of them, they are invariably Ancient Germanic in origin or have their roots in a Latin form and at the very least would have existed. Then I think 'no no no, the word wouldn't have been used like that then it's as simple as that!' It makes me want to cry. Or drink. Or cry into my drink.

Taking this to an extreme, your Viking story would have to be written in completely correct 10th century Norse. No matter what period we're writing about, we're still writing for modern readers. From my reading of first-hand accounts going back to the early 1600s, people more or less talked the way they do now, and expressed the same ideas in pretty much the same ways. It's not hard to think of ways to express thoughts in ways that don't jar modern readers. "Yo, dude, hit me up and we'll chill at mi casa" only needs to become "Hey, come to my house and we'll relax" and does not need to become "Prithee squire, voyage to my domicile and we shall 'de-shoe our horses'." It's also too easy to overdo it. Do the "look inside" and compare some of the dialog in Chris Bohjalian's Hour of the Witch, to that in Francis Spufford's Golden Hill. Granted they take place about 100 years apart, but the latter is much more accessible (and I enjoyed it vastly more) partly because the author didn't try too hard to capture the vernacular of the day.
 

Svala Bjornsdottir

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When I'm doing my best to avoid anachronisms, my aim is not historical accuracy, but rather the illusion of historical accuracy. I want to show the readers the setting I love. I want the readers to be able to imagine that they are there, in the marketplace of that particular little town or in the ballroom or what have you, right beside the characters, and ready to understand their way of seeing the world. If there is a risk that a word or a phrase might shatter the illusion, I won't use it. Accuracy or not, it's just not worth it if it's not helpful in building the illusion.


But you don't know whether something is really, truly lost on the reader or not. There will be at least one person somewhere who would know that historically accurate word, and appreciate you using it. Don't underestimate your readers, especially if you are writing historical fiction.

Good luck!

:troll
To be clear when I say lost on a reader I mean in terms of context not meaning / direct translation... the more accurate word not having the necessary nuance and therefore causing a flat read... not lost on he reader as in going over their head. Damn. HF readers and Sci Fi ones should never be underestimated unless you want taken down a peg or six... there's a prequisute thirst for attention to detail in the fans of these genres I find lol