I didn't know the exact dates off the top of my head, only a very rough idea of the timeline of language transition, but I knew that Shakespeare was writing at about the same time as England's early attempts at colonizing the Americas, and he was definitely not using Middle English.
That's a good point about Ichabod's grasp of how disease works! I guess in Ichabod's time they knew a little bit about contagion (enough to understand that giving blankets used by smallpox patients to the Native Americans would spread the disease to them), and Ichabod does react strongly against all the plastic barriers and such in the hospital, which he might appreciate more if he understood how germs spread. Still, you are totally right that his understanding of what is going on is too sophisticated. Maybe after finding out about the genocide of the Native Americans a few episodes ago he did some research into what happened and learned about how diseases strike harder in populations that have never been exposed to them?
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regna
(no subject)
Date: 2013-10-26 08:49 am (UTC)That's a good point about Ichabod's grasp of how disease works! I guess in Ichabod's time they knew a little bit about contagion (enough to understand that giving blankets used by smallpox patients to the Native Americans would spread the disease to them), and Ichabod does react strongly against all the plastic barriers and such in the hospital, which he might appreciate more if he understood how germs spread. Still, you are totally right that his understanding of what is going on is too sophisticated. Maybe after finding out about the genocide of the Native Americans a few episodes ago he did some research into what happened and learned about how diseases strike harder in populations that have never been exposed to them?