There are scores of idioms that are strikingly modern.
#Mad men business crossword series#
Draper's new contract in season three includes a "signing bonus," a phrase that was extremely rare outside of sports (the staid "bonus for signing" was far more common) Paul Kinsey is urged to "keep a low profile" at a meeting in 1963, a phrase that spread like wildfire only in 1969 and in season four Honda sets a series of rules to "even the playing field" in a competition, a phrase that (along with the more common "level the playing field") seems to have entered the boardroom around 1977.
Talking like an investment banker would have had approximately the allure of talking like an accountant.īusiness vernacular seems to trip up the writers again and again. Not only is the individual phrase wrong so is the whole field of metaphor. Don Draper and his peers in grey flannel suits looked out on a dull, relatively unimportant banking sector for them, leverage meant debt as much as it meant power. Widespread use of "to leverage" metaphorically is a creation of Reagan's America, not Kennedy's. Leverage presumably sounded like a hard-nosed business term in the table read but it comes from banking, and hard as it may be to remember, investment bankers did not always rule the roost of American business. Last season, Pete Campbell angrily reported that Philip Morris used Sterling-Cooper "to leverage a sweeter deal" from another agency. Modern boardroom language creeps in with striking regularity. It's in business language, though, that Mad Men really shows its weaknesses.
Only in the 1970s (presumably thanks to an influx of dorm-room reprints) did the poster re-enter the common vocabulary. (Technically, actually, the poster said "loose lips might sink ships:" most modern prints seem to remove the "might" for impact.) But though the phrase did originate during the war, it quickly fell out of use afterwards. The combination "lips sink," spoken by Pete Campbell's mother-in-law in season 1, threw a major alarm from the machine, even though "Loose lips sink ships" was originally a World War II propaganda poster. Other slips show how complicated the notion of historical authenticity is.
Had Pryce wanted to take the rare step of making "euthanasia" a verb, he would have been far more likely to say "euthanatize " but most likely of all, he wouldn't have said anything of the sort. When Lane Pryce tells Draper that no one asked him to "euthanize" Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in season four, for example, his lines are clearly penned by a writer from the post-Kevorkian era. What are these mistakes? Many seem relatively harmless, but betray the modern writers.
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