Words/phrases you have seen in books that you have never heard a real life person say

Thanks for the tarletan info! I think it is also in Gone with the Wind.

At Madame Fidolia's they also had "rompers" which I imagined as stretchy little dungarees with puffy bottoms.

I sometimes think a nugatory must be a sweet factory, just as I think a treadmill ought to be a tyre factory.

@shithotlawyer ‘Penny for your thoughts’ is very much a thing where I grew up on the Lancashire/Yorkshire borders. I haven’t heard it since I moved away, though…

My grandmother still uses jersey (never a jumper at her house) and anorak, which seems to be dying out in favour of ‘coat’. Oh, and dresses are always ‘frocks’ at her house.

Tarlatan is a thin muslin-like fabric that was stiffened to offer a cheaper, lighter weight alternative to silk or taffeta. The Fossils, when they start at Madame Fidolia's, have to have two tarlatan dresses as part of their uniform and Meg wears 'my old tarlatan' when she goes to Sallie Moffatt's party in Little Women (and it's considered dowdy by the Moffatts, who lend her a glamorous, low-cut blue silk for the second big party!).

However, in my head as a child, I always envisaged 'tarlatan' as 'tartan' and imagined Meg and the Fossils dancing in vaguely highland costume.

I think we are kindred spirits @Shithotlawyer

I found the updated 80s books very perplexing. I knew they were children from the 30s-50s, so why were they in jeans? I was completely the same, especially with the money, why were they using 10p and 50p when they were also on steam trains? It really confused me as to when they were supposed to be set, especially as my Famous Fives had the very 70s looking actors from the TV show on the front cover, often in a scene that had nothing to do with the story as they didn't dramatise every book, and the line drawings inside were based on the same actors. Apart from Five Have A Wonderful Time which was my mum's old one and had the original drawings.

I found the updated 80s books very perplexing. I knew they were children from the 30s-50s, so why were they in jeans?

I had just come from reading E Nesbit and Noel Streatfeild too, so I had a good understanding of what children wore, quite well calibrated, at every point from about 1880 onwards. It was obvious to me by age 10 that children at different periods wore sets of things that I had never worn - but I was very clear on what they were.

In books of Enid Blyton's era they had slacks, tunics, rubber-soled shoes, galoshes, mackintoshes, knickers with elastic and pockets (where you could keep a Ten Pound Note at Malory Towers if you were a spoilt rich girl). Boys in shirts with collars, boys only wearing shorts not trousers until they were about 16.

Just as Victorian children wore long drawers, the mysterious "combinations", liberty bodices, petticoats with lace on Sundays, flannel petticoats at other times (good for stopping trains with) frocks, aprons over them, Sunday suits and general smart clothes made of velvet on Sundays, lace collars. Button boots, socks with garters. They had an endless war against smuts on their faces. I didn't know what smuts were.

And in the 30s little girls also had tarletan frocks with frills on for dancing in and shiny dance shoes with white ankle socks. No idea what tarletan is. School uniform included felt hats with hat bands in school colours and sailor hats in summer. Little boys wore hard wearing tweed suits with shorts, shirts and ties and school caps. Everyone always had handkerchiefs all the time. All boys carried a penknife and all girls carried a pencil stub.

Clothes had to be made and cared for differently too, and I understood that until the 50s frills might be whipped, collars could be starched, frocks might be basted, darts might be put in things, hems might be let down (if velvet, this didn't work as the underneath velvet would be newer-looking and create a line, which was a shame). Until long after the 50s socks, jackets and other clothes would certainly be darned and patched and otherwise reinforced. Doing Mending was a thing, it could take up your time, was often expected of girls, sometimes you would even have to mend sheets and pillow cases, and the job included large baskets. I stress I had never, myself, done any of the above things or even seen them done!!

I have really enjoyed remembering all this and writing it here. I am sad to think that the rich cultural and social historical knowledge I imbibed PURELY from children's books might now be erased by bowlderising and updating.

With children reading less and less, even if books are not updated they will also have less exposure to these kinds of exciting yet confusing descriptions of clothes, food, homes and so on, that you had to puzzle out, from reading many books set in each era.

It's not the same to get a general impression of Holmes and Watson on screen with clothes and accessories, as it is to read "His stout Malacca cane" and try and imagine what the hell it looks like, its colour texture and purpose.

I think jerseys were in the original editions.

I was always fascinated as a child reader by the bit in EB's The Adventurous Four (set during WW2) where Andy the hardy Scottish fisherboy is advising the visiting MC children to bring warm clothes with them for a sailing trip, and tells the girls they need to wear jerseys and skirts, and Tom that he needs to wear shorts and jerseys, then asks him if he has any trousers, and Tom 'sadly' says no.

Tom is 12 and still wearing the shorts that were 'appropriate childhood wear' for MC and above boys. Andy, 14, WC, just left school and working FT on his father's boat, has graduated to adult long trousers.

The children in my editions of the Famous Five published in the 70s and early 80s were all described as wearing jerseys. I don't know if that was from the original or if they had been updates (as I think they wore "slacks" in the original and that had become "jeans" in my version).

Indeed.

But I imagine that when the books mentioning brushing curly hair were written, it was a perfectly normal thing to do - and probably still is for many older women with curly hair.

Yes, but in the days before frequent hair washing, the brushing would distribute the hair’s natural oils so it probably wouldn’t turn into the frizzy mass of static that you would get now if you shampooed your curly hair and gave it a brushing.

It was very common when I was a teenager in the 1970s (in Somerset), though, had I ever been called upon to do so, I’ve have written “wotcha”!

A PP mentioned “penny for your thoughts”. My grandfather (who died in the 1970s) used that quite often.

On the subject of curly hair, surely people with curly hair always used to use hairbrushes before wide-tooth combs became popular? My mother had very curly hair and always used a brush and a “normal” comb.

I would have said discombobulated - Sophie Kinsella used it quite a bit, and I'd never read or heard it before. But at the weekend a 13 year old told me he was discombobulated. Then we had a discussion about what a brilliant word it was.

In at least one Oscar Wilde novel I have read, all of the protagonists are incapable of just sitting down. Instead they invariably "fling themselves into a chair".

😂 Great point! They'd have to slip their boots off - something no-one's ever done in the real world, boots having to be yanked, pulled, heaved or wriggled to remove.

I thought footpads padded around the streets ĺooking to mug someone, rather than in houses.

Now, could footpads legitimately pad around their houses?

I use egregious a lot, but only in honour of the League of Gentlemen sketch in which it features.

Oh, god. I've said, heard, done and seen almost everything in this thread! Rather than admitting that I and everyone I know are pretentious, over-demonstrative twats, I prefer to think this is what happens when you've been reading a lot of things for a very long time, and have seen many films.

I clicked on the OP in hopes of "WE'RE BEING PULLED INTO THE EVENT HORIZON!" or "I confess that I have engaged regularly in sexual congress with agents of Satan". Or even "She was accosted on the Darlington road by a footpad".

That said, I'd quite like muggers to be called footpads again 😏

They're very fond of nugatory at work, which I have not really heard in use elsewhere.

A friend used ‘batrachian” in a WhatsApp the other day, which I was very pleased by.

I think all words are "literary devices used to describe things", aren't they?

The OP didn't restrict us to the dialogue in novels. So the words used in the author's narrative voice are fair game.

but those words are literary devices to describe things. Although having said that I have described the tension as being palpable.

In nice words I have heard - heard someone use the word febrile in a meeting this week. Egregious is also popular where I work. Purview is another one that I approve of, infra dig (only heard once that was on the radio) and thin end of the wedge which is lovely to say.

Yes agree, the book isn't saying someone said the word exclaimed is it!

Crikey i say fizzog, I'm 54 but will have got it from books or my parents. I didn't know it was posh, I am very much not from posh stock.

Have we had "palpable" yet? Things are often palpable in novels, usually fear and tension. I think that IRL the only things described as palpable are "masses" investigated by doctors.