Why do British authors keep making this very obvious mistake?

[YaWeeFurryBastard]

Yet again I’m reading an otherwise good book which refers to a character being unable to put up the money to make bail. This is set in England, bail in England does not require a surety payment except in very limited circumstances. Why do authors or editors not check this to make sure it’s factually accurate?!

See also characters being bailed after they’ve been charged with murder, something which is particularly unheard of in England. Magistrates don’t have the power to grant bail for murder charges.

Surely at some point pre publishing, someone with a basic knowledge of the English legal system reads the book, or do they just not care?

I’m probably very over invested but it’s bloody annoying and almost undermines an otherwise believable story.

Nope, it's a regional dialect.

I always suspected it had once been in use in British English because the Welsh word is a calque.

Even the very British Harry Potter books reference a “sweater” which Hermione was wearing at Malfoy Manor
Yes, that's another one I changed to jumper when I read out loud to the DC!

Thats funny that you would say that because the very scots woman who gave me a tour around Edinburgh used this locution quite a bit. And I have definitely heard it in London and elsewhere on many trips.

The UK has lots of local dialects. Not everyone speaks the King’s English.

It's not confined to a particular region so I'd say it's colloquial or non-standard, but my quick google search shows it's becoming more and more accepted in the standard language too.

"my research shows that this usage (which used to be restricted to some regional British dialects) is becoming more widespread in British English, and is even appearing in edited writing such as newspapers and magazines.”

"Although the usage is uncommon in US English, she says, it “isn’t completely unknown there"

The Grammarphobia Blog: We were sat ... or were we?

The wrong word usage that irritated me most was on TV rather than in a book. It was a dramatisation of the search for and arrest of Peter Manuel (Scottish serial killer). The events happened in the 1950s and a lot of trouble had been taken to get the setting right, including filming in the area where the Manuel family lived (council houses). A young woman who had been attacked was able to identify her attacker as a man who travelled on the same bus going to work and that he lived on her estate. She would actually have called it a scheme and never an estate and it was quite jarring to hear.

Although the usage is uncommon in US English, she says, it “isn’t completely unknown there"

I have never encountered it in written or spoken English in the US by an American. And I'm pretty old.

It’s the anachronisms that irritate me. An award-winning novel some years ago (totally forgotten the name) about Nelson’s navy which had a child with a teddy-bear.

Tights at a time when stockings were the only option. It’s sloppy writing/poor editing and it can spoil an otherwise good book.

School inaccuracies also annoy me - it’s more common to see a kid referred to as being in the wrong school year rather than the right one! It’s not hard to work out so pretty annoying.

Also, secondary school pupils below sixth form do not routinely have “free periods” nor do they “drop” subjects as standard nor less get thrown out of them! I know it happens occasionally but you see it all the time in books and it’s extremely rare. In fact I’ve known plenty of people be under the impression that their year 10/11 child could drop a subject just because they weren’t good at it or didn’t like it - yeah, school doesn’t work like that!

Teachers do have frees but rarely leave school during them and if they do it’s pretty much never to do something social. They can’t be taken out of a lesson in progress except in the most dire of emergencies and people also can’t come wandering into school to talk to them at the drop of a hat!

I think the saddest thing—and it happens in a lot of modern novels—is that unless the writer is a historian of the period they are writing about (and even if they are) they will not seamlessly include a lot if cultural references that have ceased to be relevant: cigarette culture, hat customs, where/when people sit or defer to others, embedded class markers in speech or behavior, car culture, references to crafts or material culture we no longer remember (antimacassers, laundry marks, postal service). The taken for granted physical and social world of the near past is just not really available to a genre writer unless ghey are a serious student of it.

There is a very good book 📖 n the subject: ALBION’s SEED. Which explores the different origins of settlement in the US. It has sections on the dialects of the various settlers and persistence over time (preservation of very odd and old English dialects dating back to the , 16th, 17th c periods of settlement. You might find it there in a southern region though I agree Ive never heard it here.

I just read a book where the research was so well done and the period detail so impeccable I praised the author on Twitter and she said she’d spent 4 years immersed in the world. God, it was amazing to a read a book where my teeth weren’t on edge for inaccuracies.

(Their Finest Hour and a Half, by Lissa Evans).

Thanks for the recommendation! I will look for it!

True, but I don't think it's necessarily sad exactly. A good writer will keep their audience in mind and give them just enough period detail - not too much. If there are loads of references the readers don't understand, it'll put them off, and you'll have lost them. How many under-40s now know what laundry marks are, or gaspers, or a Lagonda? I only know because I love 1930s novels and have read quite a few.

It's all about getting the balance right. And that goes for the language, too. A 1920s romantic hero might say to his girl, "But darling, I do care," which was quite strong really, amounting to "I love you." But if you put that in your period romance, you risk a lot of your readers thinking it's much milder, the opposite of "I don't care." So you lose the power of the scene to all but the most clued-up of your readership.

Yes, true! I saw an important period play about the trenches in WWI in New York. It was written right after the war and had not been put on much. And the language was so archaic that even I had a hard time grasping some of the plot points. Basically the protagonist had some very discreet way of referring to alcoholism and shell shock so that everyone was upset all the time but you couldn’t tell why.

I suppose this is true to an extent - I’ve read some old novels where the reference to a woman being pregnant has been so oblique that it’s a real surprise when a baby turns up! Going back and scouring you can usually find where it was revealed but in the most roundabout of ways.

Ah yes “she gave birth between two paragraphs” is the way I always think of it. Also: homosexuality, race, and sometimes class or (in the UK ) Irish or Jewish identity are often both very important and conveyed quite covertly to modern eyes.

I have lived almost my entire life in the Southern US, and I have never encountered it.

Yup. And Michael Crichton books always seem to have a full chapter after the end explaining the background, relevant science, intentional changes etc. It really pleases me.

Some of these are regional variations within the UK though. I had a childhood friend who called torches flashlights; she was from somewhere in the south and we were midlands.

Jumpers are knitted and sweaters are made of sweatshirt fabric, as far as I was brought up.

And Roald Dahl lived in the US for a while. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was originally based there, so a lot of the language was changed for the UK. The money was originally a nickel, I think?

I seem to remember a Roald Dahl interview, in which he said he used Dollars and other American terms, because he was aiming at a larger market, in the USA and that British people would understand his meaning.

I didn’t know that. But ‘would you like to have me do this’, ‘I visited with her’ and ‘I wrote him’ all sound strange coming from British characters.

Thanks for letting me know the title, OffMyDahlias. I'll head off to glamorous downtown Bracknell to look for a copy.

Now I can concentrate on the actual topic - I'd add that it can also be excruciating when a writer has done lots of research and throws it about liberally without paying attention to the writing or the plot. Top example of this: The Librarian Spy by Madeline Martin. Really interesting subject, easily one of the worst books I've ever read.

" In fact I’ve known plenty of people be under the impression that their year 10/11 child could drop a subject just because they weren’t good at it or didn’t like it - yeah, school doesn’t work like that!"

But they can drop them in year 9 by not taking them as options for GCSE right? I presume that's what's meant.

Well, yes, the quote said it wasn't common. If you read the article it actually gives the number of times it's found in the corpus (not many).