Duas respostas de Newsweek e Registro de idioma
Quando perguntado por que eles escolheram seguir a dicção do livro e a falta de contrações, Ethan Coen disse
We’ve been told that the language and all that formality is faithful to how people talked in the period.
Quanto a se as pessoas realmente conversam ou não, Mark Liberman, do Departamento de Linguística da Universidade da Pensilvânia, escreve:
I know that that informal American speech in the 1870s was far from contractionless, and in fact I suspect that it had roughly the same proportion of contractions as it does today. Therefore, what Portis (and the Coens?) did was either false archaism or poetic truth — or both.