peggy-hed

I’m not averse to criticism. I criticize most things that enter my field of vision, so I expect some of it to come back in my direction — both to me personally and the things that I like. So I’m fine with people saying that the Black Keys are better than the White Stripes and that “The Wire” is overrated. You’re wrong and I hate you, but that’s fine. You’re entitled to your idiotic worldview that stems from generations of inbreeding.

What’s not fine is pointy-headed intellectualism burning away precious minutes of my life with pointless nit-picking. Take it away, New Republic:

Last Sunday’s third episode of this season’s Mad Men was one of the best in the series on many levels, which was why for me, a frequent little problem with the show stood out more than ever. Namely, the show’s depiction of how people speak is less accurate than the loving exactitude with attire, cocktails, product labels, and the like.

Wait a minute. You mean actors’ dialogue isn’t how people actually speak in real life? BRING ME THE HEAD OF DAVID MAMET ON A STICK.

The most glaring example in this episode was what seems to have gone down as a memorable line from Peggy Olson, erstwhile secretary who is slowly climbing the corporate ladder. “I’m in a good place right now,” she says, which is dramatically compelling – it makes Peggy seem “cool,” a proto-feminist on her way to our modern reality, in contrast to what a dowdy little twinkie she seemed to be when we first met her. But would that woman use that expression in 1963?

Oh Jesus. I hate this writer so much, and I still have so far to go.

Not that the expression is as new as many may think.

Actually, I don’t think about how old expressions are. Because I’m not a total gaywad.

Locutions have a way of going further back than intuition would suggest, just as it is something of a surprise to find out that the first McDonald’s opened way back in 1948 (or the first Wendy’s in 1969). I, for one, first heard “I’m in a good place” from a person of a rather New Age-y frame of mind in September 1994, and that certainly wasn’t the month it originated.

Who in God’s name recalls the first time they heard a throwaway phrase 15 years ago?

However, would a secretary from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, in a frilly collar have said “I’m in a good place right now” 31 years before that?

Maybe! Why the hell not?

Note, the issue is not a literal usage concerning physical location – some might think of the quotation from James 2, “And if you pay attention to the one who wears the fine clothing and say ‘You sit here in a good place,’ while you say to the poor man ‘You sit over there’ …”. Catholic Peggy may well have known that passage. However, its modern usage is metaphorical, having to do with spirit and development. It wasn’t something Marlo Thomas’ Ann-Marie on That Girl would have said, even when she was in a good place.

In Sunday’s Mad Men episode, therefore, when Jennifer Crane gets up and takes her husband over the Drapers’ table saying “I want to” see how they are, crisply pronouncing want separately from to, it’s false. That woman, even with her poise and aggressive social aspirations, would have said wanna just as we all do when we are not reading from text or laying down an answering mcahine [sic] message. The want to would have been all the more unlikely from someone who had had a drink or two (especially the stiff ones still ordinary on Mad Men as opposed to today’s Chardonnay).

I’ve never met a linguist before. If I ever do, I’ll begin the conversation by punching them in the guts until they spit blood.

Vincent Kartheiser’s Pete Campbell talks this way constantly, the idea being to convey that he is a high-WASP scion. However, people are people and especially, boys have always been boys. Would a real Pete Campbell, even knocking back highballs as is his wont, really casually talk like a Hardy Boy with the crisp, measured diction?

Are all these questions rhetorical?

I certainly understand that Mad Men is a confection, and on a certain level enjoy the characters’ aristocratic tones as an artifice just as we all enjoy the too-perfect costumes and saturated color. However, an artifice it is: when we read of producer Matthew Weiner and his crew attending to actors “getting the language right,” the “right” in question is not the same kind of “right” as concerns the toys and fabrics and magazine fonts.

Oh no! Something on a scripted television show doesn’t accurately reflect real life! Hey buddy, how did they say “Choke on my cock” in 1963?