Talking our way to social order

Some thoughts on the language of Deadwood

The actual town of Deadwood, South Dakota, around 1874

A few years ago, I wrote a piece about the HBO series, Deadwood, about how it uses language as one of the means by which the characters control violence in this ungoverned settlement. Linguists will tell you that in most languages, the length of an utterance is often an indicator of its level of poli…