Welcome to my perfumed garden

except that in historical AUs, modern-day slang tends to seriously *detract* from the zeitgeist of the piece. my preferred solution for historical AUs is to avoid modern concepts and slang all together. if you can find and use contemporary to the era slang, if not, there are modes of speaking that will convey level of formality just fine without resorting to modern slang.

but also, what tends to irk me about historical AUs is that a lot of them ring false on the set-up. a slave is not going to be completely informal with a non-slave, especially in ancient greece or rome. it doesn't matter what the the slave's *function* is, the fact that the slave is literally endangering his life when he does something like that is what will drive the interaction between the two. also, various societies had very strict rules about not consorting with outsiders. the jews were one of these societies.

then there's the fact that there are several influences on modern-day blair that wouldn't have occured in the ancient world. partially because people just didn't think that way, partially because society as a whole was much more stratified and social rules much more rigidly enforced, and partially because of technilogical advances. modern-blair's dislike of guns won't necessarily translate into a dislike of bows, swords, pikes, halberds, etc. in fact, his intellect and understanding of the world around him would lead him to being a designer of catapults, ships, arquebesqes, things of that nature - if he had the good luck to be apprenticed to an artificer. which is problematic in and of itself.

and then there's names. naomi's biblical, so is james.... william is tutonic german, though, and wouldn't show up on a native roman or greek - and it would be some variation of wilhelm, besides. i'm not sure how old 'blair' is... but i'm pretty sure it's not biblical, or local. it actually looks like a gaelic-descent name to me (although i could be wrong), which would mean that a jewish boy would never be named that at the time.

erm, sorry... you hit my internal history nut there...

-bs