rule 92 lives

[calimac]

Rule 92 declares that it is impossible for an American author to write a novel involving British nobility without totally screwing up the terminology. B. got a library book for consideration for the fantasy award that I picked up and was stopped cold in the fourth sentence. It's called The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway, and the opening scene in set in 1815 and begins like this.

Julia sat beside her grandfather's bed, holding his hand. The fifth Earl of Darchester was dying.
Heavy velvet curtains were drawn across the tall windows, but the late-afternoon sun found a thin opening and as the day grew older a narrow ribbon of light moved slowly across the floor and over the bed. Lord Percy's breath was shallow. Julia felt life guttering in his fingers, saw death written in his beloved face.

... wait a minute, wait a minute. Who is this "Lord Percy" who has suddenly shown up? Is he in the same bed with the Earl and also dying? Slowly the horrid truth dawns on the reader, which is that the author thinks that "Lord Percy" and "Earl of Darchester" can simultaneously designate the same person. ("Percy", it appears from further study of the text, must be his family name.) But this cannot be! If your principal title is Earl of Darchester, then you are Lord Darchester and your family name has nothing to do with the matter. Even the most brainless watcher of Downton Abbey must have noticed that nobody ever calls the Earl of Grantham "Lord Crawley".

Oh, it gets worse. In the next chapter we meet another Austen-era figure, a military man, "the Most Honorable Nicholas Falcott - Lord Nick to his men." Oh dear, oh dear. First off, this is England, so it's "Honourable" not "Honorable". Secondly, "Most Honourable" in the UK is a highly formal designation, used only with the titles of marquesses, not with personal names. Thirdly, if he's to be called "Lord Nick" however informally, then that "Lord" must be attached to his first name in formal reference as well.

Then on the next page he identifies himself as "Nicholas Falcott, Marquess of Blackdown." So he is a Marquess. But then he would be called "Lord Blackdown", not "Lord Nick", no matter how informally, nor would he be likely, as a lord of his era, to use his personal name in introducing himself. (Actually, in his era people rarely introduced themselves: introductions were performed by mutual acquaintances, and if there were none in the room it became very awkward: any reader of Austen would know that.) Lords were known by their titles, not by their names; the punchline of H. Beam Piper's alternate-history story "He Walked Around the Horses" depends on the reader being a sufficient master of trivia to recognize the name Arthur Wellesley; most people won't, although under his title he was one of the best-known lords in British history.

So it appears that Ridgway's error is not, at least initially, the common one of treating "Lord" as a free-floating prefix that can be stuck on to first and last names indiscriminately, but of considering the actual titles that the lords bear to be disposable suffixes, to be used on formal occasions but otherwise ignored. This may be true in some systems of nobility, but not in the British one.

Nick, or whatever he's called, seems awfully blasé about being ejected into the 21st century, a behavior oddity that also features in the new time-travel show Sleepy Hollow. His training consists largely of watching enough TV to learn pop culture; nothing, apparently, about what a well-bred person of his day would consider our appalling manners, scandalous behavior, or baffling technology. He learns to drive a car, and pulls a "youie". Is that how that's spelled? Without context, I would have pronounced that the same as "yowie". Wikipedia seems to think the spelling is "U-ie". Which makes sense; is the more formal form ever spelled "you-turn"?

Comments

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

My new favorite bit from the book is where the 17th century servants come up and tell Julia Percy that they are "in her corner." At least they didn't say they had her back.