Wordy

Sorry...today's another link.  (It's been pretty hectic lately - on the one hand, deconstructing my entire life into suitcase-sized pieces, while on the other, rapidly constructing an entire dining room set.  Moving van comes on Tuesday...)

This one is pretty interesting though, to me at least.  This guy has compiled a gigantic list of words commonly found in historical fiction that shouldn't be there.  If you're feeling less negative, at the top there's a link to a list of words that have been around for longer than one would expect.  Not completely sure where he gets his information - although the OED seems to be frequently cited - but it's an interesting skim.

Anyway, some interesting excerpts: 

beige: 1858 as a fine soft woolen cloth, used for dresses. This was originally made from raw wool, hence the color name (first attested in 1879), but it was occasionally dyed, so it was theoretically possible for a lady to wear a bright blue beige dress. Cf. ecru (1869), another color word from French, which is literally “crude” or “raw”, used to describe unbleached linen. 

bit of muslin: I’ve seen this in fifty Regency novels as a disparaging euphemism for “woman” and particularly, “loose woman”, but it isn’t recorded until 1823, and then simply to mean “woman”. Georgian or Regency use is due to Heyer. Cf. “barque of frailty”, “muslin trade”, etc. 

corgi: No problem if the person is speaking Cymric (it’s Welsh for “small dog”), but the word is not recorded in English until 1926. 

grandfather clock: This term for a floor-length pendulum clock is from a popular song written in 1876 by Henry Clay Work. Prior to that time, the style was called a case clock or a long clock. (Accurate floor length clocks are easier to build, since in Earth’s gravity a 40-inch pendulum has a one-second “tick”.) 

marzipan: It was marchpane (French marcepain) from 1394, but English didn’t adopt the German version of the word until 1901. (The original meaning was a candy box, not the candy itself.) 

pervert: This did not have the current sexual usage until the 1890’s. Before then, a pervert was a religious apostate, a convert seen from the rear. For example, in 1860 Thackeray called Henry of Navarre “a notorious pervert” for his “Paris is worth a mass” conversion. In 1879 a religious tract mentioned that Paul was regarded as a pervert by Jews for becoming a Christian. An extreme pervert was the semi-legendary Vicar of Bray, who was twice a Catholic and twice a Protestant in maintaining his position during the reigns of Henry VIII, Mary, and Elizabeth. When accused of having no principles, he said he had one principle, to live and die as the vicar of Bray. The song about him, however, updates his career to the “glorious revolution” reigns of Charles II, James II, William of Orange, and George I a hundred and fifty years later.  

Viking: 1840 as a Scandinavian marauder. The correct “vikingr” was recorded in 1807. In Old Norse and Icelandic, “viking” meant marauding or piracy, while a “vikingr” was an individual. (In other words, a vikingr would get in his boat and go viking.)