I just watched “True Grit” (the Jeff Bridges version) and I can’t believe how irritated I was by the stylized dialogue. I saw the John Wayne version years ago, and I thought the dialogue was, you know, the way people really talked in the 1870’s.

Now that I know there was a lot more illiteracy in the 1870’s, and people did not freaking talk the way the literate folks wrote. People talked the way they talked in Mark Twain novels, incomprehensible ethnic dialects.
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