: Re: What can I do to make my writing fit the 1950s? I'm working on a project (for a game) that needs to have a strongly 1950s feel. I, however, was born in the 1980s, so my writing has plenty

@Karen856

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Your reader's intuition about the word "backpack" seems right on; that word appears to have skyrocketed in popularity after the 1960s:

You can use ngrams and a thesaurus to identify words that didn't seem popular, or to verify which of several words were more popular during a certain period. Note, however, that ngrams is difficult to interpret at times, because of textual errors, the inability to distinguish between certain kinds of usage (e.g. a noun may have been around for a long time, but the verb form of that noun may be new).

The main drawback, obviously, is that you have to check words manually. I don't know of a tool that can check a word list for anachronisms automatically. I suspect such a tool wouldn't be hard to make, given the number of corpuses available now.

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