If you listen carefully, you'll catch phrases in Downton Abbey that are a little ahead of their time. Linguist Ben Zimmer has been on an anachronism watch and points out a few snippets of dialogue that Lord Grantham would have been very unlikely to say.

In "Oh My My," Barber is a 21st-century original: a rootsy big-band swinger with hip-hop attitude.

In her new novel, The Wolf Gift, author Anne Rice creates a new cosmology for an old monster, the werewolf. We're not all that different from the beast, she says. "You're writing about a vampire or you're writing about a werewolf," she says, "but you're really just writing about human beings."