More than ever before, the makers of movies and television shows set in the historical past take care to get period details right. What we see on the screen tends to have been conscientiously researched. Medieval peasants, Civil War-era soldiers and politicians, and Old West cowboys and Indians no longer wear obviously machine-sewn clothes made of obviously synthetic fabrics. Houses and streets contain furnishings and vehicles actually in use in the era portrayed. There is some recognition of the fact that, in days of yore, men wore hats year-round, often got dirty, and didn’t necessarily shave every day. We live in a golden age of production design—but only for what we see, not for what we hear. Script-wise, anything goes, including the lexical equivalents of a jukebox in a frontier saloon or a zip-up toga on a Roman senator.

I’ve been watching episodes of “Masters of Sex,” a dramatic series about William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the famous midcentury sex researchers. It’s a good show, every bit as entertaining and clever as Emily Nussbaum says it is. But what drives me nuts about it—and about a good many other high-end cable period pieces, such as “Deadwood” and “Downton Abbey”—is the gratuitous proliferation of verbal anachronisms.

A few examples from “Masters of Sex,” which is set in St. Louis in the early nineteen-fifties:

“I’m going to pass on the bacon.” People played a lot of bridge back then, but “pass on,” as a metaphor for skipping or refusing something, was not yet in use.

“This is way more than you owe me.” No. No way. No one used “way” this way in 1953, not even Valley Girls. (Valley Girls had not yet been invented.) “This is much more than you owe me” would be way more authentic.

“If this place were a meritocracy, they’d be throwing money at you.” The word “meritocracy” was coined in 1958. It would not make its way to flyover country for several more years after that.

“Breaking news.” You might have heard this phrase in the newsroom of the New York World-Telegram, circa 1953, but it filtered down to the general public decades later, especially via cable-news chyrons. In the fifties, the closest civilian equivalent would have been “We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin.”

“Trust me, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” Nobody said “Trust me” back then. Everybody said “Believe me.”

“Heavy!” As an interjection exclaiming that some idea or experience is portentously important (as opposed to simply denoting an object that weighs a lot), “Heavy!” is post-1965 hippie slang. It would not have been used in this sense a decade earlier, any more than “Bummer!” would then have been used to denote a bad experience or, indeed, anything at all except a hobo.

“If the Reds nuke us…” As a (usually derogatory) term for Communists or the Soviet Union, “Reds” passes period muster. “Nuke,” especially as a verb, does not.

“I’m so sick of Establishment thinking.” The late, great British journalist Henry Fairlie repurposed “Establishment” as a noun and adjective, referring to the adepts and/or ideas of a self-perpetuating, dominant élite, in a 1955 essay for The Spectator. The roughly parallel nineteen-fifties bugaboo was “conformism.”

“It’s a game-changing offer.” William Safire, the late Times columnist and conductor of the paper’s “On Language” department, nailed down the etymology of this one in 2008. “Game-changer” made its début in 1982, in the sports sections of newspapers, referring to decisive plays in particular games, not to changes in the rules or methods of play. The term made its metaphorical way into business jargon during the nineties and came to rest in politics after the turn of the century. “In early 2003,” Safire wrote,

White House officials began telling journalists “nuclear weapons are a game-changer” and to transform Iraq would be “a geopolitical game-changer.” By June of the next year, President Bush made it official, with definition attached: “A free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East is going to be a game-changer, an agent of change.”

Game-changing, you see, does not always change the game for the better.

“The board was blindsided.” This extremely useful football term, referring to the sacking of a quarterback from out of his field of vision, did not enter the language as a metaphor for unpleasant surprises until the nineteen-seventies.

“I knew that on Day One.” Another dismal excrescence of the seventies. When Eisenhower was President, a person would say “from the start,” or “from the beginning,” or “I always knew that.”

“I’m trying to get my head around it.” More hippie slang. It’s just possible that someone might have said, “I’m trying to get my mind around it,” but even that would be a stretch.

I suppose you are more likely to notice (and to be irritated by) anachronisms like these if you are of a sufficiently advanced age to have been alive and sentient during the period covered by “Masters of Sex.” But some fraction of younger people—those who listened attentively to the talk of their parents and their parents’ friends, those who have read fifties novels and watched fifties movies—may notice, too. Anyway, Hollywood, why do you bother getting the visual details right if you’re going to ignore the aural ones?

Are there no production designers for language? There ought to be.

Photograph by Michael Desmond/Showtime.