I just watched Pirates of the Caribbean. I love it, but when the little girl at the beginning tells young Will “It’s OK” I cringe.
This is my biggest period-movie pet peeve – use of the word OK in oh, the eighteenth century, medieval Scotland, fifth-century Japan. Directors, I have a brief historical note for you. My dates are likely inaccurate, but the word “OK” was a campaign slogan for a US president sometime after 1830. It didn’t come into common usage until at least the 1870s, and even then, you may not have heard it on the streets of America until 1905 or so. Got it? So in Braveheart, when the bride is shuffled off to satisfy the local lord’s rights of primem noctem and whispers in her husband’s ear “It’s ok, everything will be ok” she is at least five hundred years premature and I’ll thank you to remember it.
Goodness.