The New Yorker, “Love Triangles and Linguistic Slips on ‘The Hour'”

August 25, 2011

Elizabeth Minkel, “Love Triangles and Linguistic Slips on ‘The Hour’” (The Book Bench Blog, The New Yorker, Aug. 25, 2011)

If you’ve heard anything at all about “The Hour,” you’ve probably seen at least a few references to “Mad Men,” a show that’s renowned for its painstaking recreations of a similar era. The trouble with “Mad Men’s” preëminence is they’ve set themselves an impossibly high bar: when I hunted for their linguistic anachronisms, all six of them were pretty clearly spelled out (there’s even a YouTube compilation). All right, six might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the mistakes are relatively infrequent—ensuring that a few bad phrases have gotten more than their share of attention from dedicated viewers. When the show’s creator and head writer, Matthew Weiner, talked with the Times’s Ben Zimmer last year, he owned up to his most glaring error: Joan’s “The medium is the message,” delivered years before Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase.

Read the rest here.

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