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Word Choice Part 6: Is it regency or modern

  • Writer: Heather Moll
    Heather Moll
  • 6 days ago
  • 3 min read

Do you ever read a regency romance or JAFF and come across a word that sounds too modern for Georgian England? Well, it's always a good idea to check your assumptions!


I use Google’s Ngram and the Online Etymological Dictionary along with primary sources determine if a word was in use—and in use in the same way—when I set my books. Not everyone cares, but I enjoy the process and the result. Although, I'll always choose a modern word if the period accurate word could hurt someone today. And readability matters, too. I'm still writing for the modern reader, after all.


You can check out my previous posts about this "Tiffany Problem" and other words I've put into my books that might sound modern at the bottom of this post.

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In a book out next year I wanted to use the phrase "tide over", as in I wanted Elizabeth to joke with Darcy about needing an ale to tide her over while they wait for something to happen. While it obviously came from seafaring (I really should do a post on naval terms we use all the time), I wasn't sure if the figurative meaning had taken hold yet. But it's actually from from earlier:

Also from 1620s figuratively, "carry as the tide does," hence "carry through, manage; succeed in surmounting," usually with over.

In that same book, I had written that Elizabeth, "... ought not to have been so short with him for acting in her best interests." I thought maybe "to be short" with someone might not have had that meaning yet. Apparently, the meaning of being curt or abrupt with someone is from the 14th century. I was good!


Another word from that book was "queasy". It sounded so casual to me I wasn't sure it was old enough, but it was from the mid-15th century. There weren't a ton of hits on Ngrams that weren't in poetry, plays, or medical advice texts, but it was good enough for a character to think in their own head.


The last one I'll mention today was a phrase I put in the book because I came across it by accident while looking for something else. It talked of something being smashed to atoms and that phrase would have been perfect for my scene in this book. I also found phrases like blown to atoms and dashed to atoms.


The ancient Greeks had a concept of an invisible, indivisible building block they called atoms. Early scientists revived this philosophical idea of an atom in the late 17th to 19th century by wondering about the composition and the nature of matter. In the early 1800s, chemist and physicist John Dalton found evidence that elements were composed of discrete units of small particles that could not be subdivided or destroyed, and he applied the word atom to those units.

So Darcy could definitely be afraid that something, or someone, would be dashed to atoms.


Do any of these surprise you? What word have you come across in your reading that you thought was anachronistic but turned out to be correct?


Read my previous post about the “Tiffany Problem” and to see other words and phrases that sound modern but were actually in use in Austen’s day.





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