A year or so ago, I confessed that when I read novels that take place in pre-internal combustion days, I don't clearly distinguish among various horsedrawn conveyances -- they're all coaches to me. I have no mental image of "fly," "trap," "landau," "chaise," "phaeton," "cabriolet," "sulky," "surrey," "curricle," "gig," "hansom," "buggy," "four-wheeler," or "spring-van." The pictorial or social resonance of these colorful names is something to which I'm pretty much tone-deaf.
I was therefore amused when just yesterday I happened upon the following passage in Flaubert's Sentimental Education (completed in 1869 but set in the 1840s). Frederic and Rosanette attend the horse races in a "berlin." Stuck in traffic, they find themselves surrounded by a crestomathy of carriages: "barouches, britchkas, wurts, tandems, tilburies, dog-carts, covered wagonnettes with leather curtains full of singing workmen out on the spree, and go-carts carefully driven by fathers of families. There were crowded victorias in which some young man would be sitting on the feet of other passengers, with his legs dangling over the side. Big broughams with cloth-covered seats carried dozing dowagers; and occasionally a magnificent high-stepper went by, drawing a post-chaise as simple and smart as a dandy's tail-coat."
I'm positive that Flaubert chose his words carefully and I'm equally sure that he had no premonition that his vocabulary would be obsolescent in just fifty years and incomprehensible in a hundred.
Every contemporary novelist knows that it matters whether his hero arrives in a Jeep or a Jaguar or a jalopy. If his book will be read in a later century, extinct and quaint words such as "pickup," "step-van," "SUV," "Buick," "station wagon," "jeep," "hummer," "flat-bed," and "Subaru" will be annotated with copious scholarly footnotes. And the words to songs as well. How much scholarship and how many sentences will it take to fully explicate "We'll have fun, fun, fun/ Until Daddy takes the T-bird away?"
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