I'm finding that I have an inordinate love for picking out anachronisms. Is that strange? I'm reading a novel right now called The Other Boleyn Girl which fictionalizes Anne Boleyn's rise to queenship in relation to her sister, who also had an affair with Henry VIII. Anyway, they made a reference to the law against buggery (sodomy), but the chapter was set in 1532. I happened to read on Wikipedia last night that the Buggery Act originated in 1533. I was absolutely delighted.

Another thing, is that this book has employed the word "upstart" very liberally, and I wondered if that word was around back then. Well, it pretty much was, but the Online Etymology Dictionary says that the word was created in 1555. Can I count this as an anachronism? The book is written in the first person, so I suppose that I could look at it from the view that she is writing the story many years after the fact. That brings me to my difficulty with first-person narration. If they're not writing it like it's a memoir, or they don't say things like, "Years later, I would come to realize..." or "Now that I am an old man..." or whatever, should I imagine the narrator sitting down in their old age to tell the story? Even when I'm not trying to decide whether or not to celebrate another found anachronism, I have issues with first-person past-tense narrative. I am putting way too much thought into this.

Bottom line: I would rather have authors mistakenly include anachronisms in their works than make no errors, because I simply love to find them.