My wife and I just got back from seeing Lincoln, which bowled us over—the combined efforts of Steven Spielberg and John Williams (two names that fill the mind with dread) couldn’t mar the brilliance of Tony Kushner’s writing (the language in the script is a thing of joy throughout) and Daniel Day-Lewis’s acting in the title role (his will be the Lincoln of my mind’s eye henceforth). The music is (inevitably) overbearing at times, and (of course) the movie goes on a few minutes too long (see this post), but never mind that; it’s the best movie I’ve seen in quite a while and I recommend it unreservedly.
However, this is not a movie review blog, and I’m writing about it here not to praise it but to complain (mildly) about a couple of linguistic missteps. I’ll forgive them the pronunciation of John Quincy Adams‘s middle name as /’kwinsi/ rather than the correct /’kwinzi/ because the fellow who says it that way is from Kentucky and could plausibly not know any better—if he’d been from Massachusetts, I’d have twitched discontentedly. I did in fact so twitch at two points. The first was when Lincoln pronounced the last word in the phrase “forever and aye” as /ay/ (as in “Aye aye, sir!”) rather than the correct /ey/ (as in “A, B, C”). This is not a matter of dialect or idiolect; in the nineteenth century anyone who used the word would have said it in the only available way (which they would have heard in speeches and sermons, not learned from books). To quote the OED (in an unrevised entry from 1885): “The word rhymes, in the literary speech, and in all the dialects, with the group bay, day, gay, hay, may, way.” The second was when Lincoln is telling his (truly hilarious) story about Ethan Allen going to England after the Revolution and being insulted; when he asks where the privy is located, Lincoln talks about his being directed “thence” when the appropriate word is “thither.” Again, these are words to which dwellers of the twenty-first century are unaccustomed but that no one of Lincoln’s day would have confused. All together, now: tut tut!
Addendum. Ben Zimmer has a nice column on the language of the film. (As he says, “Picky language types may yet find more to poke at.”)
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