I recently saw the movie "Changeling", starring Angeline Jolie and directed by Clint Eastwood, and a couple of bits of vocabulary caught my attention. I thought I'd run them everyone and see if I'm completely off the mark.
1. Jolie's character tells her son, in a scene set in 1928, that he can find milk and a sandwich "in the fridge". I've done a little research and found that true refrigerators did exist as early as 1915, but it's the slang term that bothers me; I'm thinking she should have said "in the icebox". (That, by the way, is the spelling of the word in the SDH captions; some have suggested that early adopters would have written it "frig".)
2. In a later scene set in 1930, a police officer refers to a "serial killer". While such people have certainly existed for centuries, I don't recall hearing this particular phrase used before about 1970.
Fascinating movie, by the way.
"Fridge" did exist at least as early as 1926, according to my dictionaries. You're probably right about "serial killer." Brief searching turns up nothing concrete before the 1980s.
I just wondering how many period movies there are in which a gay person is described as “gay†or “queer†before those words were connected to homosexuality (or in which someone is referred to as “homosexual†before the concept of sexual orientation existed). I'm sure that I've probably seen at least one or two, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.
It happens all the time that writers are not aware of historical matters. I believe it was Mr Shakespeare himself who had the Romans eating tomatoes in the days of the Empire. He was probably not aware that tomatoes only grew in Europe after the discovery of the New World.