Anachronisms that aren't – modernity avant la lettre in period literature

Whether we're reading the Booker prize books or watching Downton Abbey, we all love to catch out an author in an anachronism. Philip Hensher, in a piece on this year's Booker longlist, found problems in several books, and took particular issue with the use of "Hello" in Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries, set in 19th-century New Zealand. It seems that "Hallo!" – meaning "Stop, wait, hang on" or as a surprised or informal greeting (and much used in Dickens) – hadn't yet morphed into "Hello" as a gracious salutation. On the plus side, Hensher gave a date to one novel, Jim Crace's Harvest, because of the use of mauve – the name for the colour was invented in 1856.

At the other end of the literary spectrum, with the new series of Downton Abbey in full flow, we can expect the usual criticisms that the language and activities of staff and aristos are inauthentic and too modern – there's a website, Prochronisms, devoted to such TV nitpicking. There's no harm in that – the site is funny and informative – the site proprietor refers to it as Downton Crabbey – but other critics can be too ready to assume that because something doesn't sound right to them, it is automatically wrong.

What do you call the opposite of an anachronism? There are plenty of words to describe shades of meaning in anachronisms – prochronisms, parachronisms, anatopisms – but there doesn't seem to be a word for something that sounds like an anachronism, but actually isn't. We need such a word, because they pop up a lot in books.

Suppose Julian Fellowes had a young man talking to a venerable older woman: he knows she has recently moved and asks: "Where are you hanging out now?" That would sound unacceptably modern – except that the situation and question come from Agatha Christie's The Seven Dials Mystery, published in 1929, just a few years on from the current Downton era.

Careful reading can give you quite a few examples like this, where you feel that if they didn't know the date of publication, critics would jump on the non-existent anachronisms. When Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl was made into a TV movie and then a Hollywood film, there was some comment on Anne Boleyn wearing a large gold B on a chain round her neck – rather a blingy, modern Essex-girl look was the conclusion, and surely incorrect. But contemporary pictures clearly show her as wearing exactly that.

To my great surprise, in James Joyce's Ulysses, a minor character, Professor MacHugh, "took a reel of dental floss from his waistcoat pocket and, breaking off a piece, twanged it smartly between two and two of his resonant unwashed teeth". This feels all wrong, and you'd be hard pushed to find any other reference to dental floss – pretty much, in any literature ever – but there it is, in a book produced in 1918-20 and set in 1904.

While you're getting over that one, what about F Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night published in 1934, set in the 1920s:.Dick Diver has gone to visit the young actress Rosemary in her hotel room:

Dick saw her with an inevitable sense of disappointment …. "Miss Television," he said with a lightness he did not feel.

There seems to be no definitive answer as to what he meant by this – we'd love to hear from any reader who knows – although there exists a rare copy of the book apparently inscribed by FSF to "Miss Television". So – a pet name? (To be clear: the word was in existence then, as was television itself, but there was no public broadcasting at the time; it was an esoteric work in development.) Elsewhere in the book there is what seems to be an overheard snatch of a song: "She's – not – wired for sound but on the quiet you ought to try it" – apparently invented by Fitzgerald, but again, "wired for sound" has a strange, modern, technological feel.

Returning to Christie – no apology, any true reader of her books knows that she is the sociological chronicler of the short 20th century – her skill at reflecting the world around her can result in strange conjunctions. So in the postwar Taken at the Flood, young Rowley visits his uncle: this is a world where the door is opened by a maid, and the aunt and uncle are still eating dinner en famille in the dining room at around 8.30pm. The maid offers to show him to the dining room, "but Rowley negatived this" saying he'll wait in the study – not a construction you'd expect to find in this book from 1948.

Back in 1931, in Peril at End House, the bluff Captain Hastings takes pride in English achievements, while the Belgian Poirot pointedly says that this must console him "for the defeats at Wimbledon" – quite a surprise for those of us who assumed only the British won then, and that complaining about the lack of success (and being surprised by actual success) was a recent development.

Spotting these quasi-anachronisms – another one is an unlikely mention of colonic irrigation in a bizarre Upton Sinclair thriller of 1947, Presidential Mission – becomes addictive. What anachronisms can you add to the list – and can you come up with a better name for them: OKchronisms? Not-chronisms?