. . . because this is the kind of language geek I’ve turned into.

According to the OED, I am now permitted to use “fucking” as a intensifier in sentences (e.g. “Get out of my fucking house”). It’s certainly attested by 1893 — in a slang dictionary, which suggests it wasn’t brand-new — and likely appeared as early as 1864. Which is delightful, because outdated vulgarity just doesn’t carry as much impact, and right now I need Dead Rick to be as forceful as I can possibly make him sound.

I’ve fudged my word choice a little in the previous books, in cases where I just couldn’t find an equivalent period term. (Like the use of “medieval” in Midnight Never Come: that’s a nineteenth-century word.) And a few of those instances were slang-related, because it’s so hard to find evidence of truly casual and non-standard speech from more than a couple of centuries ago. One of the lovely things about moving forward in time with this series is that my available vocabulary, standard and otherwise, gets larger with every book.

We now return to the scene that is causing Dead Rick to swear.