# The Language of "Deadwood"



## Badrabbit (Nov 18, 2004)

I am not sure how many of our members watch this program but given the general education level of most here, I thought we might have several linguists, or maybe even some philologists and etymologists, who could answer a few questions I've had about the show since I started watching it. 

I understand that Deadwood was a town largely made up of outlaws and degenerates but was the language really that foul in the 1870s? Did the "f-word" really hold as much prevalence in the language as it does in contemporary times and was it used in the modern fashion where it can be used as almost any part of speech?

Was conversation among friends and family actually carried out with such carefully worded question and rejoinder or were conversations between close confidants held in a manner more similar to contemporary practice?

Was the language so lyrical and metaphorical even among the less educated? The show always has brilliant dialogue (despite the constant cursing) complete with veiled threat and innuendo in nearly every sentence. It would seem that a person would need at least a fair amount of education to construct sentences which always contain the proper nuances needed to convey the cloaked but intended meaning.

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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets. 
Anthony Burgess


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## globetrotter (Dec 30, 2004)

last year, there were several articles in the NYtimes about Deadwood adn the language. one ver good article by a linguestics proffessor was pretty clear that he felt that a lot of the words used, espectially c***sucker, were not in common use at the time.the general consenus seemed to be that people were not so foul mouthed.

about the high level of gramar and vocabulary - it does seem counter intuitive that at a time when there were so many peopl who didn have any education, and so many immigrants, the language would be so rich. maybe it was because people valued better language skills, and/or because there was no tv


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## Sir Henry Billingsgate (Dec 14, 2005)

> quote: at a time when there were so many peopl who didn have any education, and so many immigrants, the language would be so rich.


I'm not sure that linguistic ability and educational levels go hand in hand. Homer, for example, was almost certainly pre-literate.

I have been told that creoles, which are full-blown languages in their own right, actually are constructed by three- and four-year olds. For, example,the Middle English of Chaucer actually is a creale formed from Norman French and from Anglo-Saxon. There, actually is the example of Nicaraguan Sign Language, a full-blown sign language, that had been developed by deaf Nicaraguan children who had been isolated on an island during the 1980's civil war. Shakespeare notoriously "knew little Latin and less Greek." Many of the "somebody else wrote Shakespeare's plays" theorists basically refuse to accept that somebody with such a rudimentary education could have been such a master.


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## Yckmwia (Mar 29, 2005)

Here's an article from _USA Today_ discussin' the cussin' on _Deadwood_.

https://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2004-05-02-deadwood-cursing_x.htm

It's hardly authoritative, but it gives a general overview of the consensus regarding the historical accuracy of the characters' profane speech. No matter, _Deadwood_ is a great show, although the second season was a little less great than the first, which is unusual for an HBO series.

"Don't tell me not to live, just sit and putter/Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter" Barbara Streisand


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## Acct2000 (Sep 24, 2005)

Thank you for posting that article. This at least answers the profanity part of the question.

When I read quotes from people from the 19th century, the language seems more formal and eloquent than what the average person speaks today. On the other hand, we seldom see the words of average people.


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## Kav (Jun 19, 2005)

People forget how multilingual society was in the 19th century west. Large parts of the southwest were still conducting most daily affairs in spanish ( Billy the kid's last words were " que est?" before Pat Garret backshot him), Nebraska and the Dakotas saw the great northern plain tribes speaking german and swedish, indian sign language was a universal medium and huge workgangs of rival irish and chinese workgangs were fighting each other instead of the bosses.'A chinamen's chance' comes from the mean irish habit of setting fuses short before the chinese labourers could ascend back up in safety: making the job something like russian roulette.Between elizabethan english-gaelic and Cantonese nobody else could understand them half the time unless educated in catholic LATIN. The Western has become our Camelot, and like that work has been reinterpreted and added to. The daily language was actually rather circumspect of the surroundings. There really was a 'cowboy code' and only the most depraved would speak coursely in front of a lady let alone all the other crimes portrayed. Even courting was done in a metaphor of offering sweet baked goods and compliments on their sweetness by the suitor.Andy Adams memoir THE LOG OF A COWBOY recounts his trailparnter known as 'the reb' for past CSA service sitting in a saloon when a buckskin fringed, long haired character insulted a 'fallen angel.' The Reb had to 'sleep hard' parralleling the drive for a week until the posse had inspected every herd. It seems he took issue with the insult, and was knocked backwards in his chair. While falling he drew twin navy colts and shot the offendor. Some forms of communication stay constant!


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## crs (Dec 30, 2004)

I do not expect much in the way of historical accuracy from any TV show or movie.

A really fine novelist, Pete Dexter (National Book Award for "Paris Trout"), wrote a novel about Deadwood called Deadwood, and I read that the show's creator said he never read the book. I would think that in doing the research he would have read everything easily available. 

Dexter, whose background is as a newspaperman, could have written a nonfiction book about Deadwood and chose to write a novel instead. Maybe there isn't enough original source material available to do it any other way.


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## rws (May 30, 2004)

I never heard of the television show before reading this thread. But I did my doctoral work in nineteenth-century American history and so can comment on the language of the time.

Even the average American of the 1870s would likely have been more expressive and more eloquent than what I daily hear around me now. Yes, we had many foreign-born (massive immigration took off about 1880, though non-English immigration had been sizeable since the 1740s -- by which time the mainland British colonies had already become economically the best places on earth for the ordinary man or woman), though foreigners were much commoner in the big industrial and commercial cities of the East and Midwest than on the frontier; but even primary education was more rigorous than much of what can be experienced today, and rhetoric and expression, with reference to achievements of the past, received more attention. I vividly remember reading while a graduate student the extensive correspondence, covering _ca._ 1856-1888, of a poor, far-flung Yankee family: the handwriting of most members was a blotchy scrawl and misspellings not infrequent, but the quality of thought, construction, and expression, replete with classical and Biblical allusions, far exceeded in felicity of language and depth of consideration anything I am likely to hear today.

More eloquent and expressive? Yes. Less scatalogical, blasphemous, and obscene? Probably: not only correspondence but dime novels (the cheap paperbacks of the late nineteenth century) and social observations bear this out, at least for the native-born population, both black and white.

A question, then: why are so many contemporary Americans inarticulate, resorting to obscenity and violence in place of precise thought or expression? Is education to be blamed, or a regressive society? Or are we slowly (or rapidly) becoming stupider as a people, in a sort of inverse Darwinism?


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## Yckmwia (Mar 29, 2005)

> quote:_Originally posted by crs_
> 
> I do not expect much in the way of historical accuracy from any TV show or movie.
> 
> ...


Well, I think one can understand why _Deadwood's_ creator, David Milch, would avoid consulting other fictional treatments of the subject: he wouldn't want to be influenced by those treatments in creating his series.

"Don't tell me not to live, just sit and putter/Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter" Barbara Streisand


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## JLibourel (Jun 13, 2004)

Kav, I believe The Kid's last words properly were, "Quien es?" ("Who is it?" or "Who are you?"). "Est" is Latin, not Spanish!


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## Kav (Jun 19, 2005)

[:I]Thats It! I'm digging out my latin primer and Marcus Aurelius. To totally digress, I watched an interview with Judge Alitto's latin teacher. 98 years old and still busy.


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## bosthist (Apr 4, 2004)

> quote:_Originally posted by rws_
> 
> I never heard of the television show before reading this thread. But I did my doctoral work in nineteenth-century American history and so can comment on the language of the time.


RWS:

What is your area of expertise?

I concur with your observations about language in the 19th century. I think people were less distracted in the 19th century. I also think people, out of necessity, had to write more. Letters were the primary mode of communication among family members and friends--no picking up the phone for a brief conversation--so economy of language and clarity of meaning were paramount. What isn't clear to me is if 19th century people actually spoke in the manner in which they wrote. People today tend to write in the manner in which they speak, which has led, I think, to smaller vocabularies and less elegant writing.

Regards,

Charles

"Si monumentum requiris, circumpsice"


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## rws (May 30, 2004)

> quote:_Originally posted by bosthist_
> . . . What is your area of expertise?
> 
> I concur with your observations about language in the 19th century. What isn't clear to me is if 19th century people actually spoke in the manner in which they wrote. . . .


Undergraduate, I focussed on colonial America; postgraduate, on the antebellum period. Oddly, in actual employment I dealt largely with the twentieth century.

A "pop-up blocker" assassinated my response to your concern. In briefest sum, a great deal of literature from the late colonial period onward does give sufficient insight into modes of speach to allow us to conclude (I think) that typical native English-speakers in America were more articulate, better-skilled communicatively, than their counterparts today -- at least, when comparing men or women from similar social classes.

What interests me is attempting to discern the causes of this slippage in effective communication. One can note such declines in, say, Latin in late antique Rome; but too much emphasis can be put on precise parallels.


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## JLibourel (Jun 13, 2004)

> quote:_Originally posted by Kav_
> 
> [:I]Thats It! I'm digging out my latin primer and Marcus Aurelius. To totally digress, I watched an interview with Judge Alitto's latin teacher. 98 years old and still busy.


Hate to break it to you, Kav, but that Latin primer ain't gonna do you a lick of good with Marcus Aurelius. His Meditations were written in Greek. I always found him the most sententious old bore imaginable! With him for a father, I could never blame his son Commodus for turning out the way he did![}]


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## bosthist (Apr 4, 2004)

> quote:_Originally posted by rws_
> 
> 
> 
> ...


While I suspect you're right that people then were more articulate given the written evidence I've seen (I'm a historian of the early Republic) I still get this nagging feeling that I'm falling into the trap of assuming people spoke as they wrote. I'm just not sure how much evidence exists of how the "lower sort" spoke. I will add that one need only look through the Dictionary of American Regional English to see how much is being lost today as American English is being homogenized by mass culture.

Regards,

Charles

"Si monumentum requiris, circumpsice"


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## Concordia (Sep 30, 2004)

Sturgeon's Law definitely applies to speech and conduct. The reason older periods look relatively better is that we have little record of the other 90%. Nowadays, communication has been democratized through reality TV, discussion boards, and the like-- so it's all out in the open. []


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## Badrabbit (Nov 18, 2004)

No one has really addressed my second question about the formality with which friends and family speak on the show. There never seems to be any discourse between friends that is not weighted down with politesse and obduracy.

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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets. 
Anthony Burgess


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## Yckmwia (Mar 29, 2005)

> quote:_Originally posted by Badrabbit_
> 
> No one has really addressed my second question about the formality with which friends and family speak on the show. There never seems to be any discourse between friends that is not weighted down with politesse and obduracy.
> 
> ...


Well, there aren't many friends on the show: Charlie and Jane speak freely, if fouly, enough; conversation between Seth and Sol _can_ be fairly casual, but Seth is such an uptight cat that these occasions are rare; Trixie and Dan are more allies than friends, but they speak directly to one another; Doc gets to the point when the situation requires. But I know what you mean. In any event, I think that the show's writers are just enjoying themselves by creating stylized dialogue: Alma's ultra-studied diction in one scene, Al's poetic flights of obscenity in the next. I don't think the writers are striving for verisimilitude in this instance; they're just having fun.

"Don't tell me not to live, just sit and putter/Life's candy and the sun's a ball of butter" Barbara Streisand


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## Sir Henry Billingsgate (Dec 14, 2005)

> quote:. I vividly remember reading while a graduate student the extensive correspondence, covering ca. 1856-1888, of a poor, far-flung Yankee family: the handwriting of most members was a blotchy scrawl and misspellings not infrequent, but the quality of thought, construction, and expression, replete with classical and Biblical allusions, far exceeded in felicity of language and depth of consideration anything I am likely to hear today.


It would be interesting to determine what impact the King James Version of the Bible had on their language.


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## Badrabbit (Nov 18, 2004)

> quote:_Originally posted by Yckmwia_
> 
> 
> 
> ...


Sol and Seth was exactly what made me think of this. Their conversations always seem so stilted.

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Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets. 
Anthony Burgess


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