When the eternal debate about the merits of L Sprague DeCamp's tinkering with Robert E. Howard's Conan tales began, for the umpteenth time, a day or two ago on the Howard listserver, someone asserted that Howard's work was more timeless than DeCamp's.
For some reason this brought to mind an anachronism I recalled from DeCamp and Carter's Thing in the Crypt where Conan's "leaden legs moved like pistons". It's a basic rule of writing that a writer should avoid comparisons to things that don't exist in the time frame you are writing about. So for example, Tolkien wouldn't say that the dragon, Smaug, "screamed like a jet engine". At any rate, the comparison of legs to pistons brought to mind the engine of an auto and jarred me out of my suspension of disbelief.
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Now perhaps pistons were much more commonplace in Conan's day than I realized and I'm nitpicking--but lest people think I'm being overly critical of DeCamp (and being an author, I do full well realize that no author is perfect) I will mention that I quite enjoyed his Flame Knife adaptation.
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