that's so funny. My young man and I are working our way through the Mad Men ouevre and we were just asking last night about whether there was an anachronism database for it. So he's busily perusing it right now looking for some of the things that caught our ears.

As far as accents and England, basically if two populations divulge, one of them pretty much keeps the original accent. So places like Virginia and so on actually have a more accurate representation of what the English accent sounded like at the time. 

I've seen that kind of subtitling too, for people with accents that seemed to me to be understandable, and have often wondered if it's necessary. 

And your husband is hardly a fair sample, having lived for many years with someone with a mild English accent!

Yeah, we pretty much turn the subtitles on right from the beginning of DOCTOR WHO and DOWNTON ABBEY. 

That's interesting. I wonder how many other people in the U.S. do that? I got quite offended the other day when they interviewed someone on the news from the UK and subtitled him. His words were clear as day. i asked my husband, a New Yorker who's never been to England (but obviously understands me pretty well when he chooses to!), whether he understood the guy on TV; Frank had no problem with the interviewee. They had done the same thing to another interviewee who had a slight Italian accent only a few days earlier, once again unnecessarily I thought. I wonder who decides to subtitle and when? Especially when viewers have the option of simply pushing a button if they want/need to do so.

I don't recall having a problem with "The Committments." 

We routinely have the subtitles on when watching anything on BBC America. Or Downton Abbey. 

Wow, I thought The Commitments was clear enough.  I understand East Enders was a problem, though.

Clever Clint... don't you know he translated it into Gaelic, @Kim?

That reminds me of when I watched "The Commitments" with a group of friends and ended up having to translate it -- even though i'm English and the movie's about a bunch of Irish guys forming a band. It also happened with Monty Python.

Okay, I am digressing now.  One of my favorite movie blunders was showing the Clint Eastwood character in Million Dollar Baby trying to read Yeats in gaelic.  Yeats, of course, wrote in English.

That is a very good point, Mitch.  Ironically, the only way to make it clear that the Founding Fathers sounded like English guys back then, is to make them sound like English guys sound today.  If that makes sense.

I think one only gets a sense of what was at stake in the Revolution if one remembers that, at the outset, these people considered themselves English.  But perhaps I digress.

Mitch-- yes, that's true, the cursing was off the hook, even for HBO.  However, the characters seemed to converse in a mingling of guttural/low language and something akin to the Queen's English.  I'm wondering how historically accurate the "high speech" was because a lot of it was non-intelligible to me.  (And I have a dual-track Bachelor's in English with a focus on etymology.)

But that is an interesting point about swearing vs. blaspheming in the Old West!