Inaccuracies in fiction

Sex has always meant biological sex, but gender could mean biological sex, or girl = pink/boys=blue.

It’s not a mistake, but the way the way the language has evolved, and it contributes to the confusion today. When I was a child, gay meant merry and happy, and queer meant strange, for example.

It really wasn't like that. Remember when things were unisex, not gender neutral?

Google has this wonderful tool called Books Ngram Viewer which searches across all books that Google has access to so that you can search for words and phrases and the date when they appear. I compared "your sex" with "your gender" in British English over two centuries and got the following.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/interactive_chart?content=your+sex,+your+gender+&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&case_insensitive=on&corpus=en-GB-2019&smoothing=3

…..and just to muddy the waters, in the very same Nicholas Nickleby there are numerous instances of 'sex' being used correctly, eg:

`In the meantime,' interrupted Kate, with becoming pride and indignation,
I am to be the scorn of my own sex, and the toy of the other; justly
condemned by all women of right feeling, and despised by all honest and
honourable men'.

But ‘gender’ has never meant the same thing as ‘sex’. Sex is biological, whether you are male or female, while gender is social — what a particular society, time period etc expects of men or women in terms of behaviour, self-presentation etc.

I mean, I agree that a certain type of person used ‘gender’ when they meant ‘sex’, but this is a mistake, just as saying ‘myself’ when you mean ‘me’ is a mistake.

An unborn baby, after a certain point, has a sex, it doesn’t have a gender, even though gendered behaviour is sometimes already attributed to it (‘Feel him kicking — you’d know he’s a boy!’).

In the past, gender was the polite word for sex, when talking about male or female. Maybe that’s why gender was used.

I’ve often wondered if you are permitted in fiction to name things which will have a copyright (or similar) so something similar is substituted.

Generally yes, if you're referring to the thing itself. "Dr Martens" is a registered trademark, but what that means is that you can't make a big black boot and label it Dr Martens, and sell it as such. Because then you would be making money off of someone else's idea and work. But you can describe a character as wearing Dr Martens, because that's just calling it by name.

Re copyright, you can copyright text but you can't copyright a title. So it's fine to refer to (say) Bohemian Rhapsody, but problematic to have your character say the words "Bismillah, no! They will not let you go!" etc. Apparently some music publishers (owners of the rights to songs) are very eagle-eyed about this, particularly in the US.

I’ve often wondered if you are permitted in fiction to name things which will have a copyright (or similar) so something similar is substituted.

id love to know as I’ve been writing a book (fiction) in my head for about four years. One day I’d love to get it on paper, so far I’ve got bullet points of main story lines in various notebooks and the odd bad chapter on my iPad. I’m a bit in awe of a distant relative who is published and well known having started writing in her later years but I’m too shy to ask her such questions.

I’m no literary scholar but I presume that in nineteenth century Britain, people of a certain class might have chosen the word ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’ in mixed company?

Anne Elliot said 'sex' when she was talking to a man. 'All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.'

So Jane Austen must have thought it was acceptable, because Anne was never vulgar. If she'd had Lydia Bennet say it, there might have been some doubt!

it’s the way that recently written fiction uses it. For instance, two working class unmarried women in WW2 who are chatting amongst themselves and discussing the potential sex of their unborn babies. No way would they be saying ‘I wonder what gender my baby will be?’

oh, I completely agree!

@Terpsichore I’m no literary scholar but I presume that in nineteenth century Britain, people of a certain class might have chosen the word ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’ in mixed company?

I’ve no problem with that but it’s the way that recently written fiction uses it. For instance, two working class unmarried women in WW2 who are chatting amongst themselves and discussing the potential sex of their unborn babies. No way would they be saying ‘I wonder what gender my baby will be?’ If they start talking about baby showers, I’ll have to burn the book! 😤

Call the Midwife is another TV series that’s highly entertaining but completely unrealistic in so many ways.

Interesting you say that about 'gender', Wappity, as I’m currently doing the Nicholas Nickleby readalong on here and was brought up with a jolt at the latest chapter, which has Fanny Squeers ranting at her former friend, Tilda:

'This is the hend, is it, of all my bearing with her deceitfulness, her lowness, her
falseness, her laying herself out to catch the admiration of vulgar minds, in
a way which made me blush for my—for my—'
^^
`Gender,' suggested Mr Squeers, regarding the spectators with a malevolent
eye—literally a malevolent eye.

And I would have agreed, I’d have expected Dickens to use 'sex' at that point - in fact I went down a rabbit-hole to make sure that wasn’t an updated version, but no, it was the 1839 original text.

To me it’s like telling someone to ’Google’ something instead of saying ‘look it up’ .....

Or 'run and find out' - which is actually from Kipling, I discovered.

Yes, I get really annoyed by the use of the word GENDER in anything written that’s set in the last century.

To me it’s like telling someone to ’Google’ something instead of saying ‘look it up’ when Google has only existed in recent years.

The clue was in the word " imagine" surely?

Only if her mum wanted to spend the money on her which didnt serm to be the case.. The favoured child went to the local school too.

I just remembered another one from when I read (or tried to read, I gave up after the first few pages) Jilly Cooper’s latest book about football. Rupert Campbell Black is described as being 60 in the present day which would mean he was born around 1962/63, which is surely far too young to fit the timeline of Riders, Rivals etc.

She even mentions his past as a Tory MP and minister in the 80s when he would only have been about 24. Pretty sure in real life he must be at least mid seventies by now, but I assume a 60-something still just about fits into silver fox category whereas a 75 year old who everyone still fancies might be a bit unbelievable.

Sorry, accidental strike-through...

There was also oatmeal for porridge, but it was just the general suburban Americanness of Oxford, with the deafening electronic carillon of Christmas carols on the High, Dunworthy describing Kivrin as 'not even a metre and a half tall' and her hair in 'braids', and referring to academics as 'professors' when they weren't etc etc.

I know there are lots of errors in the Black Death parts of the novel, too, but those are surely more forgivable than something that's essentially set in contemporary Oxford minus mobile phones and the internet, but with time travel and a tube system that extends from London to Oxford when Willis has apparently spent extended periods of time in Oxford. Figuring out how the faculties work in relation to the colleges really isn't that hard, and when you're depicting a foul up that comes down in part to academic rivalries between different historians, and access to a piece of time-travel tech that appears to be owned by one college, rather than the History Faculty, you have to make this stuff more plausible. If Dunworthy has lent Gilchrist Badri to run the drop, then doesn't Brasenose (their college) have a net of its own? And has time travel being an academic pursuit completely changed Oxford's history degree. Because Kivrin appears to have spent most of her degree mugging up on milking, weaving, Latin prayers and the practical skills she will need in the past what about the usual gruelling essay schedule that's normal for undergraduates?

And why is it only historians who get to time travel? Don't English Lit undergraduates get to, I don't know, timetravel to Tudor London to check out Hamlet in performance, or to see, if they can't stop, Charlotte Bronte destroying Emily's possible second novel?

Imagine if the Eng Lit undergraduates are still writing essays and grinding their teeth at the time-travelling historians...

One of my pet hates! I haven’t read the whole thread, but was stopped in my tracks soon after starting to read Pat Barker’s “The silence of the girls” when a character or the omniscient narrator (can’t remember which) mentions the scent of mimosa in the air, on a Greek island in ancient Greece (i.e. 800-500 BC). Mimosa comes from Australia, and the ancient world definitely had no trading links with Australia!

@Riverlee was this 'The distance echo'? Because I'm reading that now and have noticed it too!

My mum, born in the early 1920’s, always put rugs and kelims on sofas and called them throws. I can safely say they were bloody itchy, as I suspect it was lying on Freud’s couch. In Tudor times they used rugs as tablecloths - if you look up Holbein’s The Ambassadors, there is a rug on the table in that. I don’t know if the implication was you were so rich, getting food on a valuable Turkish rug didn’t matter to you, or what. All very different to the throws you get from Dunelm etc nowadays, that’s for sure.

Unfortunately not!

That's weird!

I was thinking Connie Willis. I loved Doomsday book but there were a few discordant Americanisms in there. It was a while ago and I can only remember muffler rather than scarf but there were many. Why not run these things past a UK reader I wonder?

I loved when the kids’ primary school swapped to this. The last lesson of the day was a story time and we had milk and cookies.

The previous project was “bring a prop from your favourite book” - a lot of fun too, and so much less hassle than finding 3 costumes each year for my children.