In its native country, “Downton Abbey” has already taken it on the chin for some verbal anachronisms in Season Two (which was broadcast in the United Kingdom late last year). “Downton Abbey characters caught using modern phrases,” ran one scandalized headline in the Telegraph, with no less an authority than Oxford English Dictionary chief editor John Simpson weighing in on whether some of the show’s slang was just a bit too contemporary for the season’s World War I setting.
In the United States, audiences for prestigious period dramas have come to expect a high level of precision in the depiction of bygone eras. Shows such as “Deadwood,” “Mad Men,” and “Boardwalk Empire” have all presented fastidiously constructed simulacra of historical worlds. If details aren’t quite right, viewers are sure to air their quibbles online. But a British production is less likely to set off warning bells of anachronism among American viewers, who may not be as familiar with which expressions flourished when across the pond.
Some of the “modern phrases” singled out by the Telegraph are quite British indeed, as when the footman Thomas Barrow uses “get knotted” to mean “go to hell.” While Simpson pegged the expression to the 1960s, slang expert Jonathon Green was able to trace it a bit further back when I asked him about it, as far back as the 1944 “Penguin New Writing” series. Still, that’s well after the episode’s setting in early 1918.
In another episode, Thomas has the line, “I get fed up seeing how our lot always get shafted,” which caught the attention of both British and American fans. “Shaft” meaning “to treat unfairly” is originally an Americanism, making its first known appearance in Mickey Spillane’s 1951 novel “The Long Wait,” according to Green’s Dictionary of Slang.
