The $10,000 Beauty

In hopes of casting his readers into the era of the events that transpire the author has used the vocabulary of the period. The spellings of the day were used as well. Street and Avenue were not capitalized for example. Several words such as streetcar and backstop had hyphens. People stopped at hotels they didn't stay at them. Many of the expressions of the 1880's are no longer in use. He tried some hippodrome business makes no sense anymore, we'd say he tried to throw the game, and no one has the collywobbles either, we're just anxious. Nobody today is in high cotton, they're delighted, and we wouldn't say someone doesn't care a continental, we'd say he was indifferent. Now no one has a wire-edge on now, they're disgruntled or resentful.

Baseball was still base ball. A member of a team was said to play in the nine, not for the nine. A substitute catcher was a change-catcher. A pitcher, or twirler, was positioned between the points, or in the pitching box, not on the mound, there was no mound. And there were no dugouts, just a bench that the two teams shared. Teams rarely had more than ten players. The people in attendance were referred to as rooters, boosters, or cranks, not fans. The crowd was an audience of spectators.