History Main / CallARabbitASmeerp

* In ''[[{{Ringworld}} The Ringworld Throne]]'', LarryNiven calls some tasty rabbit-like critters "smeerps", as a reference to the {{Trope Namer|s}}, the TurkeyCityLexicon.
** Niven was also involved (with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes) in writing ''The Legacy of Heorot,'' in which fish-like creatures swimming in the stream of a colony planet are referred to as "samlon" (much to his chagrin, it took some folks half the book to notice it wasn't "salmon"). Of course, they turn out to be rather more than that...

* {{Ryzom}} lives and breathes this trope. The pigs are yubos, the toucans are ybers, the dingos are gingos, the crabs are cloppas, the ''other'' crabs are kitins, there are four different kinds of giant mosquito...and there's [[UpToEleven many, many more]].
* The ''BatenKaitos'' games do this to a degree; we have such things as "fluffpups" (poodles) and "bunnycats" (long-eared cats), as well as "pollywhales" (tiny legged orcas). And then there are the weird ones, like "pows" - pigs that, umm, give large quantities milk, and are white colored with black splotches. BatenKaitos is less CallARabbitASmeerp, more of MixAndMatchCritters. Pows for example are Pig/Cow, Bunnycats are Bunny/Cat, and pollywale seems to be Tadpole/Orca. Other hybrids include Dog/Deer and Sheep/Goat.

* ''TheJetsons'' did this a lot, despite us being tired of it after ''TheFlintstones'' [[FlintstoneTheming did it first]].
* ''TheLandBeforeTime'' series has used this trope to death, but in the past, with dinosaurs. On the one hand, if you saw stegosauruses every day, you'd want to come up with a word for them that's easier on the tongue than the polysyllabic ones that scientists come up with. On the other, the reasoning could have had more to do with the ViewersAreMorons mindset...because, of course, kids ''always'' have a hard time remembering words like "tyrannosaurus" and "stegosaurus". Therefore, everything has incredibly simplistic names, such as "spike tail" for stegosaurus. They even have a word for the sun, "great circle".

* ''{{Chowder}}'' does this with food. Butter is now "blutter", coriander is now "Snoriander", pizza is now "feetsa", etc.
* ''WesternAnimation/TheSimpsons'': "Behold, the two headed dog, born with only one head! And behold, out of the mists of time, the legendary Esquilax, [[MixandMatchCritters a horse with the head of a rabbit, and the body...of a rabbit!]]"

* ''TheSnorks'' is a great example of this. They have Shellovisions, not Televisions. [[FlintstoneTheming Things are changed to be underwater related]].

* ''ElfQuest'' has such creatures as "zwoots" (a kind of humped horse-camel hybrid) and in contrast to them, "no-humps" (better known to the reader as "horses"). Most of the planet's other flora and fauna closely resemble Earth's, except as the plot demands. Speaking of which, Creator/TerryPratchett parodies this in ''Pyramids'' by using the term "camels of the sea" (given that camels are "ships of the desert"...)

* The ''Assassins' Guild Diary'' inverts the "bizarre parallel explanation" trope; it doesn't try to justify the word "byzantine" at all, but does claim the politics of the ancient Komplezian Empire were so byzantine, they led to the modern Morporkian word "complex".

* In ''TheUnderlandChronicles'', the assorted oversized creatures of the overworld are given simpler names, allegedly by the people who live there. (Rats are known as "gnawers", spiders as "spinners", and so on.) This is what the creatures of the Underworld actually call themselves, just translated into the nearest thing in English. Humans have one of these names too among the Underworld creatures[[hottip:*:[[HumansAreTheRealMonsters "killer"]], [[FantasticRacism but they don't like to hear it]].

** No, they're not dinosaurs, they're ''tyrannids''[[hottip:*: Possibly a ShoutOut to Warhammer40000's Tyranids]].

* The "Huns" referred to in ''Disney/{{Mulan}}'' are almost certainly the Xiongnu, who were similar in many ways and often identified with them but actually different. This is presumably because 'Huns' is much easier to rhyme in English; the Mandarin version at least does call them the Xiongnu.

* In the German "Kapitän Blaubär" show the ever-lying captain serves "Zorx mit Mürschlampf", some alleged alien food speciality, to his ever-nagging nephews.
Luckily, this menu has an uncannily similarity to spaghetti with meatballs. (Frankly, it IS spaghetti with meatballs.)

** In the ''Worldwar'' series, humanity adopted some advanced technology from the Race and thus used their words for it; for example, lasers are called "shelkwank light" and optical storage disc players are likewise called "shelkwank players".

* Several of Jo Clayton's works use this—for example, ''chinin'', first mentioned in ''Moongather'', are clearly dogs (and explicitly identified as such in ''Changer's Moon''). However, there are also plenty of [[HorseOfADifferentColor beasts of different colors]], and even the occasional [[CallASmeerpARabbit smeerp identified as a rabbit]].

->'''Garrus:''' Hey Shepard, you ever played Quasar?
->'''Shepard:''' No.
->'''Garrus:''' You just add random numbers. You have to try to get as close as you can to twenty-one without going over.
->'''Shepard:''' Oh, you mean Blackjack.
->'''Wrex:''' '''[[InsistentTerminology NO.]]''' It's the ''FUTURE''. It's called ''QUASAR''.
-->-- '''The cast of ''Franchise/MassEffect''''', ''Webcomic/AwkwardZombie''

* Although it's not exactly a completely different world, in ''HarryPotterAndTheOrderOfThePhoenix'' Harry calls the wizards and witches walking around in lime-green robes with clipboards "doctors" and Ron says, "Doctors? Those muggle nutters who cut people up? Nah, they're ''healers''."

Compare YouMeanXmas, FutureSlang, YouAreTheTranslatedForeignWord, NotUsingTheZWord, and {{Uncoffee}}. See also SpaceX, HorseOfADifferentColor, CallAPegasusAHippogriff, FlintstoneTheming, and HoldYourHippogriffs. Contrast CallASmeerpARabbit, CapitalLettersAreMagic.

* ''Webcomic/{{Unsounded}}'' does this for ''magic itself''. The world's FunctionalMagic is called "pymary". WordOfGod justifies this, though, saying that the word "magic" implies something mystical and unknown. Pymary may look supernatural to us, but in the world of Unsounded, [[SufficientlyAnalyzedMagic it's an ordinary fact of life]].

* ''Webcomic/{{Unsounded}}'' does this for ''magic itself''. The world's FunctionalMagic is called "pymary". WordOfGod justifies this, though, saying that the word "magic" implies something mystical and unknown. Pymary may look supernatural to us, but in the world of Unsounded, [[SufficentlyAnalyzedMagic it's an ordinary fact of life]].

** In turn, "sandwich" means rape to him.

->'''Garrus:''' You just add random numbers. You have to try to get as close as you can to twenty without going over.

** And they send ''grolm'' (ostriches) into combat.

* In an episode of ''CaptainKangaroo'', the Captain dreams that he is visited by aliens who need "a glunk full of gleeger" to fuel their spaceship. He tells them he has no idea where to get such a thing, but while they're there he offers them a glass of milk, and wouldn't you know it...

* ''PennyArcade'' complained that ''StarWars'' ExpandedUniverse writers take this kind of thing to ridiculous extremes:

* In ''[[{{Ringworld}} The Ringworld Throne]]'', LarryNiven calls some tasty rabbit-like critters "smeerps", as a reference to the TropeNamer, the TurkeyCityLexicon.

** The Aiel are growing ''zemai'' instead of corn, ''algode'' instead of cotton and ''t'mat'' for tomato. While these smeerps (and the Seanchan ones, too) are at least partially [[JustifiedTrope justified]], being unknown outside the Aiel Waste, this is not so with tabac (this smeerp tends to get lost in translation, anyway).

** The [[IShouldWriteABookAboutThis introduction]] to ''The Empty Chair'' implies that TheFederation has been calling the [[strike:Romulan]] Rihannsu [[CallASmeerpARabbit smeerps rabbits]] all along.

* Creator/AlanDeanFoster (ghost writing for GeorgeLucas), in the {{novelization}} of ''ANewHope'', [[LampshadeHanging lampshades]] this during an early conversation between Obi-Wan and Luke, who grew up on a [[SingleBiomePlanet very dry planet]]:

** Similar to the ''PennyArcade'' example with ''StarWars'' above, ''SciFiDebris'' took exception to Star Trek "updating" metaphors like describing someone as a 'third nacelle' rather than a third wheel, pointing out that ''we'' haven't updated metaphors about horses and carriages to make them about cars, for example.
*** Indeed, StarWars has a least a little more justification than Franchise/StarTrek in using this trope when it comes to metaphors. At least Star Wars is meant to be in its own 'verse, with no canon ties to Earth. Whereas Star Trek is meant to be our own Earth (pretty much, anyway), just centuries into the future.
* "Debbie" the Bloop in ''LostInSpace'' looks indistinguishable from a chimpanzee. The movie adaptation improved on this by making her a far more alien goggly-eyed chameleon/lemur creature with the help of ConspicuousCGI.

** One episode had an alien trial; it turned out to be exactly like a trial on Earth, except the prosecutor, defendant, etc. had Smeerpy new titles. This was, of course, heavily [[{{lampshading}} lampshaded]] by O'Neill and Carter.

* The Rahi in {{Bionicle}} all have ForeignSoundingGibberish names despite most of them just being enlarged, cyborg versions of Earth creatures.

* In a more literal example of this trope, the rabbit-people of ''VideoGame/OdinSphere'' are called "Pookas" (not to be confused with the other [[DigDug Pooka]])

* In the first two EccoTheDolphin games, the cetaceans call themselves "Singers" and have different names for other animals in their ocean home: Shelled Ones are clams, Hungry Ones are sharks, giant octopuses are Eight-Arms, and so on.

* {{Downplayed| Trope}} In the ''WesternAnimation/{{Thundercats 2011}}'' episode "Song of the Petalars" when Wilykat teases his sister Wilykit for kissing an 8-legged amphibian he calls a "froog" on a dare from him.
* ''{{Transformers}}'' does this with anything that didn't specifically originate on Earth, which also helps explain some of the political problems they have. Best example? They're not Cybertronians, even though they all originate from Cybertron. They're either Autobots or Decepticons. Or Sharkticons or Junkions or Velocitrons and so on.
* ''TheAdventuresOfTeddyRuxpin'': Teddy Ruxpin is an "Illiop". The Brazilian-Portuguese translation [[AvertedTrope calls them bears]] anyway.

* In ''Literature/TheLordOfTheRings'', Creator/JRRTolkien refers to tobacco as "pipe-weed." This may have been to avoid the dissonance of placing New World flora in an Anglo-European FantasyCounterpartCulture. Though then again, they did have ''potatoes''. "Pipe-weed" is definitely tobacco, but, like just about everything Tolkien did, [[JustifiedTrope justified]] eventually. In the case of tobacco and potatoes in proto-Europe, the justification was that the Numenoreans, as great sailors, had sailed all over the world and brought back the plants from the proto-New World. We are left to assume that the European versions of the plants died out eventually.

* In ''Franchise/TheDarkTower'', [[TheGunslinger Roland]] has Smeerpy names for several things. For instance, anything on bread (such as sandwiches, burgers and hot dogs in a bun) is called a "popkin".

* In ''TheLordOfTheRings'', Creator/JRRTolkien refers to tobacco as "pipe-weed." This may have been to avoid the dissonance of placing New World flora in an Anglo-European FantasyCounterpartCulture. Though then again, they did have ''potatoes''. "Pipe-weed" is definitely tobacco, but, like just about everything Tolkien did, [[JustifiedTrope justified]] eventually. In the case of tobacco and potatoes in proto-Europe, the justification was that the Numenoreans, as great sailors, had sailed all over the world and brought back the plants from the proto-New World. We are left to assume that the European versions of the plants died out eventually.

* In ''TheDarkTower'', [[TheGunslinger Roland]] has Smeerpy names for several things. For instance, anything on bread (such as sandwiches, burgers and hot dogs in a bun) is called a "popkin".