WHEN CONTRACTIONS WERE DISREPUTABLE—TRUE GRIT.
WHEN CONTRACTIONS WERE DISREPUTABLE—TRUE GRIT. I was told that the characters in the recent movie True Grit do not use contractions. I checked out the discussion on two language blogs. This post at the Grammarphobia blog cites an interview with the Coen brothers (who made the movie) in which they were asked about why contractions are infrequent in the movie. Ethan responded that: “We’ve been told that the language and all that formality is faithful to how people talked in the period.” The Grammarphobia post says that contractions were “normal in speech and respectable in writing’ until the early 1700’s when writers like Addison, Swift and Pope began questioning them with the result that: “By the late 18th century, contractions were in disgrace, tolerated in speech but considered by language authorities an embarrassment in writing.” This post at the Language Log blog says that “won’t” was one of the contractions that Addison attacked in the Spectator in 1711, and that “won’t” was “damned in the same breath as ain’t” in a speech in America in 1846 (“absolutely vulgar”). Contractions began to be fully respectable again in the early 20th century. Both blog posts, using Mark Twain as a guide, think that people at the time of True Grit would have used contractions when talking without hesitation.
Perhaps the narrator of the book True grit wouldn’t have used contractions (I don’t recall whether she did.) She was “respectable.”