[fr_freak]

a look at the letters from that time period shows that even the least educated (by today’s standards; they didn’t go beyond 8th grade usually) spoke and wrote MUCH better than most students today.

It is my understanding that, in those days, letter writing, being somewhat uncommon due to the illiteracy rate, was considered a rather formal affair, so when people wrote letters, they did so with the same level of formality that one might write a business letter today. When they spoke, however, it was a different matter, sort of like the difference between what you'd say to your friends on the weekend and what you'd write in your end-of-quarter report at work. This is the mistake that many movies made from the era make, in that they assume that the formality of the letter-writing and the mode of everyday speech were the same. They were not.

[t2buckeye]

True...but if you look at the letters written by soldiers of all ranks from the Civil War period, the vocabulary was still impressive even when written to family members. For that reason, I did enjoy the vocabulary and Mattie’s diction in the Coen script. But you’re right about informal speech; for example, contractions would not have been used in letter writing, but they no doubt were used in speech.

Still, I think the Coen movie is closer to the novel’s dialogue, but John Wayne still was the best Rooster Cogburn. Jeff Bridges did a decent job, but the Duke was better. THe girl in the Coen version is excellent especially for her age.

[Inyo-Mono]

This is the mistake that many movies made from the era make, in that they assume that the formality of the letter-writing and the mode of everyday speech were the same. They were not.

It is difficult to be certain about that now. But I do know that my grandmother's letters were much more formal than her spoken words, which I heard often as a child in the 1950s when she lived with our family, though she did speak much more formally than people do today. She was born in 1888 and died in in 1961. Her Father was a Civil War vet.

[RobbyS]

The formality carries over into everyday speech. The men I worked with in the oil ,field sixty years ago, were not nearly as slangy as people my age were.