An anachronism is a person or a thing that’s chronologically out of place. It was part of a question on The Chase recently – ‘Which one of these is an anachronism?’ or something similar – and the right answer was ‘a knight wearing a wristwatch’, which is a good example. The word comes from chronos which is the Greek word for ‘time’, and ana-, a Greek prefix which means ‘up’, ‘back’ or ‘again’.
This is Chronos, the Greek personification of time, which is where the ‘chron’ bit of ‘anachronism’ comes from. I don’t know what he’s doing to that child.
‘Anachronism’ first turned up in in English in the 17th century (in 1617 to be precise). But then it was used to talk about a mistake in dating – no, not my entire lovelife, but dating a thing (the example given on the Merriam-Webster site is in etymology (yay!), when a word or its use is mistakenly assumed to have been earlier than it actually was). Back then there was also a thing called a ‘parachronism’, which is a nice word, used to describe an error when a date is set later than it should be. Unfortunately this one’s largely fallen out of use nowadays though.
One of the most famous recent anachronisms was that Starbucks cup that turned up in Game of Thrones (although technically that’s not supposed to be historically accurate anyway – dragons, anyone? – so perhaps it doesn’t count). You won’t be surprised to hear that this is by no means the first anachronistic error committed to celluloid. Here are some other movies that failed their history A-levels.
Braveheart and kilts: Mel Gibson proudly sports a Scottish man skirt in this epic about William Wallace (still never seen it), which is set in 1280. But plaid and tartan kilts weren’t introduced til the 1700s. FAIL. (Before anyone Scottish gets cross, there was a type of kilt around before this. But it certainly didn’t look like the one Mel sports in the film, and it’s highly unlikely WW would have been wearing one anyway.)
Indiana Jones and a lot of countries: In Raiders of the Lost Ark, a plane drawing a red line flies over a map that includes Thailand. But the film’s set in 1936, when Thailand was still called Siam (it wouldn’t become Thailand until 1939). Sadly Steven Spielberg didn’t learn from his mistakes in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull either – this time the plane flies over Belize in 1957. But then it was called British Honduras and would be until 1973. D’oh.
Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves and telescopes: Morethan Freeman takes the piss out of Kevin Costner’s Robin for not knowing what a telescope is (but is apparently fine with him having an American accent). But telescopes wouldn’t be invented for another FOUR HUNDRED YEARS. Oh dear.