Did anyone else notice that when a Confederate and a Union soldier were fighting in episode 2 over one of the soldiers stealing the other one's prosthesis leg one of them said 'what would I do with a friggin' wooden leg anyway, stick it in myour eye'?
He MAY have said 'freakin' but it sounded VERY unlike a word that would have been used in those days.
Yes, yes he did.
I like everything about the sets & costumes but the characters, acting and dialogue - oh boy it's a mess !
"Friggin'" as an English language"minced oath", has been dated to about the year 1600. If the various OPs here would read a book from time to time before posting, much time could be saved.
"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae
Yep, it's kind of amazing how many of 'modern' terms and words are actually far older than most people think.
shareSo very true. It's easy to check a term in the Dictionary of American slang or on the internet before posting. A lot of language we consider modern simply isn't. I just read a 19th century work by Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets - "out of sight" was a slang term far earlier than the James Brown's song.
shareThe OP (that being me) DOES 'read a book from time to time', thank you very much. I read quite a but, as a matter of fact. This is an elective message board, meant to be 'fun' so why come on here and be a dick in response to a simple question? A simple 'actually it WAS a word back then' would suffice. Show a little respect for other posters would you? What kind of issues do you have that you need to belittle someone for no reason? Maybe you should get out of your PJ'S sitting in your mother's basement criticizing people you don't even know and learn to talk to others w a little respect.
shareI get what you're saying about the constant put downs on boards like this. Its tiresome, time consuming, and a distraction. The problem is two-fold.
1. Some people define "fun" as attempting to humiliate others to make themselves feel more important.
2. Further, some people were not blessed with a parent that imparted the "if you can't say something nice..." adage.
Robin of the 311th Name:
I totally agree with you and the above reply from Diva of the Numbers. I'm an old timer and have been around IMDB over 16 years and it gets worse every year. The cellar dwellers who are waiting for their mommy to bring them their supper entertain themselves by roaming the Net forums and insulting people every chance they get. They seem to take their anger out, which they have from a lack of a real life in the real world, on their only interactions with others which are Internet forums.
These people wouldn't say the same thing to a group of strangers or friends that were discussing a TV show or movie, yet they think it okay to do on an Internet forum. Methinks we've raised a group of young people with poor interpersonal skills and who will never succeed in life with these type of actions. Even if they fake it real life sooner or later their bosses (if they even manage to get a job) will see their true mental outlook or disease and pass them by for a job or promotion.
Best just to not post directly to them as this gives them the satisfaction they crave especially when others agree with them.
As far as the dialog in the show, some of it is rather strange but I think the writers and directors did do some research on the idioms of the day. Most of the crude actions by both sides in the War of Northern Aggression are accurately replicated in the show. War is war and bad things happen and not just by bad people. Once one sees the horror of it all, one starts to think it's not so horrible after all so the cycle continues.
As far as cusssin' goes the more religious people of the time (and now too) tended to use slang replacements for vulgar terms and that's true of not only English speakers but all people. During the WONA you have to realize that many of the people were just one generation or less removed from England and Ireland and most of the cursing slang we use today has been around a long time. Also, a lot of the 'racism' of the English for the Irish by the Northerners had a lot of meaning back then. Since a large amount of Southerners were Irish and a lot of the grunts in the Northern army were newly arrived Irish immigrants so the Northerners hated them and the Southern men. The North used them as cannon fodder.
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My favorite: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Most southerners were of English and Scots-Irish descent NOT Irish -- there is a difference.
shareThere were a lot of Irish folks. Don't know if they were part Scottish or not and I forgot that the English didn't like the Scottish either. Don't know if they thought they same of the Scotsmen as they did of the Irish though. They did look down on the Irish as a lower breed of humans though.
Many in my family from both sides were Welsh/Irish/English in descending order going way back. Not sure if maybe some were Scottish.
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My favorite: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Irish Catholics and Ulster Irish protestants were both referred to as "Irish" at the time. Only until much later in the 19th century was the term "Scots-Irish" commonly used. The famine of 1846 and its long-lasting effects saw the first immigration of Irish Catholics to the US in large numbers before the Civil War. The only Catholic Irish before that in the colonies were in the British army, and the army tried to placate them with the first St. Patrick's Day celebration, I think in about 1760, in New York City. Since British army enlistments lasted for several years, I don't think many surviving ex-soldiers became farmers or artisans in the American colonies. Post-famine Brooklynites later named a hill "Vinegar Hill" (from a clash with the English in the 1790s Irish rebellion) but the name came long after the rebels fought at that site.
shareMy ancestors came to the colonies way back, 1685 from Wales to Virginia on my maternal side and stayed in the South all the way to me. 😯
On my paternal side they came to Virginia in the early 1700's, were English but intermarried with Southern Irish folks. As far as I know none never went north except to Southern Missouri along the Mississippi. LIke others they slowly moved west but never more than a few miles past the Mississippi.
Finally ended up in Miami. Can't get much farther south than that.
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My favorite: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Also, my understanding of the Old English word is the word 'frig', meaning 'to masturbate'. That does not make sense in the way it was used in the show.
But I may be wrong. It was just something that sounded strange on the script.
Made a quick trip to Wikipedia, I see.
"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae
No, no trip to Wikipedia. And as the other poster said I did look it up before I posted it. It still doesn't make sense. Even so, it was just a comment that seemed odd on a show taking place in that era. There's no reason to come on here and act like an *beep* just because you seem to think your intellect is far more evolved than mine. I highly doubt that it is.
Wait, listen - I think your mommy is calling you.
Ha! I like the reply about "minced oath". So what...it doesn't mean they used it the way the modern characters are made to speak it. They used all kinds of words back in history. Like "gay". Didn't come off as authentic. I think it sounded silly then and still do.
sharePerhaps you misunderstand what a minced oath is.
"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae
Today we use the word "frigging" as a mild form of *beep* I think this is what the scriptwriters had in mind when they wrote the line "friggin' leg". A soldier at that time would have used the original F-word. After all, it was known and used. However, it would have been more authentic if the soldier had not used an oath at all. Granted, he was angry and frightened at the disappearance of his leg, his means of mobility, but there was a female nurse in the room. Our culture has changed. Men of the 1860s were raised not to swear in front of ladies.
The F word has been used for hundreds of years. It was even used my Henry VIII and was a common word used by men. I don't mean 'friggin' I mean the word that sounds like truck. During the different changes in society where social values and etiquette are concerned it was not used as often in front of company or women, but it was used. Attitudes towards sex was different as well. There are loads of sketches of couples in varying positions from all civilizations and even during the medieval times. So nothing is that has been done is new, and nothing that has been said is new either.
shareThe F word has been used for hundreds of years. It was even used by Henry VIII and was a common word used by men.
Had he said the 'real' word this topic wouldn't exist. My whole point as OP was the odd way the word was used. I can't see a soldier in civil war times arguing w another soldier and saying 'what would I do, stick your friggin' leg in my eye?'
shareThere's a book called "The Story the Soldiers Wouldn't Tell: Sex in the Civil War". The author notes that some of the subjects he tried to research--especially obscene language--were difficult because people were loath to record that sort of thing for posterity, but he found some evidence that it existed. (Swearing at a superior was a serious offense and there were many courts martial for this.)
There is a story that Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson, who was particularly determined that men under his command use clean language, heard a man swearing at a mule, and asked the man whether it was necessary to speak that way. The mule driver insisted that if he did not, the mule would never carry the supplies to where they needed to be. General Jackson supposedly gave the man dispensation to cuss.
Some imagination is fair in recreating Civil War era speech. Words that linguists know to have been part of English for hundreds of years (and Indo-European for thousands) are likely to have been in use during the Civil War just as they were before and afterward.
It is true that words and expressions we assume are of recent origin are often really from further in the past than we think. The African-American poet and novelist Paul Lawrence Dunbar provides good examples. In about 1910 he had a character in a novel say, "That piano player is far out." Twenty years earlier, Dunbar wrote of one of his friends, "Orville Wright is out of sight." (Yes, Dunbar went to high school with and was close friends with the future co-inventor of the airplane.)