“Geographies of language matter a great deal. New Yorkers, for example, denote distance in time - “I live 80 minutes out on the Island.” “I live an hour north of the city.” - which makes sense in a place where there is no specific correlation between miles to travel and any expected trip’s length. People in Michigan always - always - hold their right hand up to you and point with a finger from their left hand to indicate where someplace is. People in Seattle wake up to weather forecasts suggesting “sunbreaks” and, on the best possible days, “the mountain is out.” One of the great challenges of writing historical fiction is creating dialogue which sounds real and of the time while still maintaining contemporary reader understanding. Another is to describe a “foreign” world to readers without stumbling into the trap which creates bad science fiction - pausing to explain details every other paragraph.”
