In an episode of Doctor Who from a few years back, The Shakespeare Code, there were eye-rolling complaints from some viewers that the program showed black Londoners in Elizabethan times, which was clearly an anachronism, a modern sop to current notions of diversity. In fact London had an appreciable black population by the 16th Century, so much so that in 1596 Elizabeth I issued an edict against “diverse blackamoores brought into these realms, of which kinde there are already here too manie”, which was completely ignored by all and sundry.
Bismarck at the Congress of Berlin:- “That old Jew, he is the MAN!” [Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann.] - referring to Benjamin Disraeli.
Argh! Not the first time I’ve been sapped by Wikipedia! Thank you!
The movie Chicago, set during Prohibition, has a number called “Mr. Cellophane.” It’s a great song, very poignant, but first time I heard it I thought “Well, that’s wrong. They didn’t have cellophane in the 1920’s.”
But they did. First used as a candy wrapping in 1912.
Thinking of Sherlock Holmes, I was rather surprised to find the slang term “nark” used to refer to a police informant in “The Adventure of the Illustrious Client” (1924).
I did a little research on the subject, and it turns out that (as I’d assumed) the modern slang term “narc” originated as a shortened form of “narcotics officer” in the 1960s. However, “nark” was in use as a slang term for informants and undercover officers as early as the 1860s. It’s unclear whether the older term inspired the more recent one or if it’s just a coincidence that they have the same pronunciation and essentially the same meaning. Either way, an accusation of being a narc would be understood by a criminal of Sherlock Holmes’s time (or even earlier) just as easily as it would be today.
I enjoy reading medievalpoc about People of Color in Art. Really opens my eyes. Why no, black people were not invented recently. Here is an example.http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com/post/87903259338/much-of-the-art-you-post-i-havent-seen-before-but
There slogan is ‘Because you wouldn’t want to be historically inaccurate.’
The British humorist “Beachcomber” (J.B. Morton), prolific in his output over a long period, was already before World War II writing anecdotes about a public school (in the UK, a private boys’ boarding school, catering mostly to the upper social classes) of his invention – this institution dedicated to the nurturing and teaching of crime and graft of every kind; gambling and other vices were rife there. His name for the school was Narkover. Allegedly, he claimed to have based it on the renowned public school Harrow; which he had attended, and hated.
As an aside, the Russian word for “snitch” is stukach, derived from the word stuchat’, “to knock” (presumably at the back door of the police station in the middle of the night, or something like that).
I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that the etymology of “nark” is somewhat similar.
In William Inge’s play Bus Stop, first produced in 1955, a character brags about owning a color television set with a 24-inch screen. At first I thought this couldn’t possibly be right, but it turns out that you really could buy a color TV in 1954 (maybe not with a 24-inch screen, but I’m inclined to think that Inge just pulled that number out of the air because it sounded impressive).
I remember my family having a pretty big B&W set when I was a mere toddler (and I was born in 1955). So I’d guess a 24" color TV is not beyond the realm of possibility.
As was the safety bicycle Butch rides in the movie.
Actually it is. TV screens in the 50s were always measured in odd numbers, so it’s have to be a 23" or 25" screen (though anything over 21" was rare).
It was a marketing superstition of the time. Around 1970, the FTC changed the standards for measuring screen size from the size of the tube to the size of the viewable area, which meant some existing sets dropped an inch to become an even number. The TV manufacturers didn’t like that, but the superstition ended around then.
[Voice of Johnny Carson]: I did not know that! 
Actually, the telephone shows up in one of the earlier novels (The Sign of Four, I think), when Athelny Jones goes to a public phone booth to call for a boat. Holmes also uses the telephone (or at least references it) at least twice that I can recall; once in The Illustrious Client, and once in The Retired Colourman.
Wait, just thought of another time … in The Three Garridebs, Watson is in the room while Holmes talks with a man on the phone.
I’ll have to check that out – I don’t recall Holmes using the telephone at all.
One of those is probably the one I was thinking of in post #10 above. All three of those are late stories from The Case-Book. As CalMeacham says, the very fact that Klinger felt it worthy of mentioning in a footnote indicates how unusual it was.
I was surprised and amused to learn that the word “fart” is centuries old. The story goes that Edward de Vere (1550-1604) let one rip in front of Queen Elizabeth, and was so embarassed that he left the country for several years. When he returned, Queen Elizabeth basically laughed off the incident, saying “My Lord, I’d forgotten the fart.”
(This is the guy that always pops up when someone claims that Shakespeare’s plays were written by someone else.)
It’s older than that. One of the oldest poems/songs in English is Sumer is icumen in (“Summer is a-comin’ in”), the oldest manuscript of which dates to circa 1260. God knows how much older the original is. It features the following immortal lines:
That last line is usually transliterated “bucke verteth”. In translation: