History Main / CallARabbitASmeerp

** Similarly, instantaneous travel is called apparition instead of the Muggle sci-fi word "teleportation", and animated corpses are inferi, not "zombies".

** There are a couple of {{Gay Euphemism}}s which are loanwords - after the ''Literature/LastHeraldMageTrilogy'' the Tayledras word "shay'a'chern" gets adopted and contracted in Valdemar as "shaych". Closer to the plains where the Shin'a'in live, their word, "she'chorne" is more common. "Fey" is also used sometimes.

* ''VideoGame/TheNeverhood'' has one scene where Klaymen gets chased around by a giant clawed monster called...a Weasel.

* ''Literature/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''."

* In ''Series/KaptnBlaubar'', the ever-lying captain serves "Zorx mit Mürschlampf", some alleged alien food specialty, to his ever-nagging nephews. Luckily, this menu has an uncanny similarity to spaghetti with meatballs. (Frankly, it IS spaghetti with meatballs.)

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

* Ride/DisneyThemeParks' ''Ride/StarWarsGalaxysEdge'' and ''Galactic Starcruiser'' (the hotel/{{LARP}} experience exclusive to Disney World) have several restaurants, snack bars and an [[SpinOffCookbook official cookbook]] in which Earth foods are renamed as ''Franchise/StarWars'' universe animals and plants:

* Subverted by ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica''. In-universe, {{magical girl}}s are called... magical girls. Not "puella magi." The GratuitousLatin is [[NeverTrustATitle just for the title]]. [[spoiler: It's also revealed to be {{Foreshadowing}} of their intended fate; if Witches are magical women, what else do you call a child who will grow into a witch?]]

* A story arc of ''ComicBook/BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' Season 8 crosses over with ''{{ComicBook/Fray}}'', in which vampires are "lurks, a spin is a lie, toy is bad, but spled is good."

* The "Hippy Hobbit Thief" Betty in ''ComicBook/RatQueens'' is consistently referred to as a "Smidgen" in the books themselves. We can presume that this is because the Tolkien estate is notoriously defensive about non-Tolkien writers referring to their halflings as "hobbits".
* ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'': Like the movie example below, Superman's iconic "S" shield isn't just an ordinary "S" -- it's actually the crest of his Kryptonian family, House of El (at least since ''Comicbook/SupermanBirthright'' made it RetCanon -- previously it was just an 'S', unless it was a symbol on a magic sword Pa Kent saw in a dream or a Native American snake symbol). Sure looks like an 'S', though...
* An idiomatic version -- in ''[[ComicBook/{{Swordquest}} Swordquest: Waterworld]],'' Torr is drowning and refers to being trapped "in Davijoen's Locker."

* In ''Fanfic/AThingOfVikings'', it is at least strongly suggested that other dragons think of Night Furies as 'Nightscreamers'.

* ''Fanfic/TheBoysRealJustice'': Frenchie in particular is thrown to learn that the term for someone with superpowers in the new Earth is ‘meta’ (as in metahuman) rather than ‘super’ (as in super-abled).

* In the ''Franchise/{{Cars}}'' series films, forklifts are referred as "pitties" because, in the first film, they all served as the pit crews for the racecars.

* Lord Business in ''WesternAnimation/TheLegoMovie'' has a collection of mystical relics that are really just mundane [[HumansAreCthulhu human]] items from the perspective of 1.5 inch tall minifigures. Among them are the Cloak of Ban Da'id (a band-aid), The Sword of Exact-Zero (an X-acto knife), and the Scepter of Q-Teep (a q-tip).

* [[http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Earth#Animal_species Wookieepedia]] has an exhaustive list of this trope as it applies to ''Franchise/StarWars''.
** Dice, for example, are called "chance cubes" (although actual dice with pips instead of colors have appeared and gone by "dice" in the EU), guns, as in [[KineticWeaponsAreJustBetter kinetic firearms]], are called "Slugthrowers", etc.

* Creator/KevinSmith once said [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYhLIThTvk in an interview]] on his having written for ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'' that studio executives asked him to call the GiantSpider demanded by the producer, Jon Peters, something other than a spider. He suggested Thanagarian Snarebeast (Thanagar being Hawkman's home planet), and they told him to go with it.

* Rather bizarrely lampshaded in a short story called "A Delicate Shade of Kipney" by Creator/NancyKress, published in an early issue of ''Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine''; her characters, third- and fourth-generation descendants of a small group stranded on an alien planet with a nearly-opaque atmosphere, speak of such colors as "kipney" and "tlem" (to the dismay of their ancestors, who still insist the planet be called "Exile" rather than "Keedaithen"). Kress unfortunately doesn't realize that words ''come from somewhere'' -- that people who'd only heard of the colors you and I speak of every day wouldn't suddenly, spontaneously, start saying such things as "What a pretty shade of tlem."

* With the exception of ''Dragonsdawn'', all of the novels in the ''Literature/DragonridersOfPern'' series have replaced "horses", "cows", "dolphins" and "dogs" with "runnerbeast", "herdbeast", "shipfish" and "canines", to name a few examples. They add a bit of spice of the series, and they are at least easy to figure out what the alien word is referring to. These are explained to be versions of Terran animals genetically engineered for Pern. They don't look exactly like their ancestral species. The dolphins in particular are [[UpliftedAnimal uplifted.]]

* In the 1930 science-fiction story ''Literature/TheGostakAndTheDoshes'' by Dr. Miles Breuer, the sentence "The gostak distims the doshes" plays a major role. This sentence is not Dr. Breuer's invention; the credit goes to a writer named Andrew Ingraham, who coined it in 1903. The sentence became much more widely known as a result of its appearance in the 1923 book ''The Meaning of Meaning'', by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards.

* Although it's not exactly a completely different world, in ''Literature/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''."
** Snape also has problems with the term "mind reading", and instead prefers legilimency (which is dog-latin [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin for "mind reading"]]).

** An odd and annoying inversion of the trope occurs with the constant use of the Italian phrase ''al fresco'' throughout the ''Collegium Chronicles'' and ''Herald Spy'' books. Why the characters use Italian in a world with no connection to ours (instead of just saying "open air") is not explained.
* ''Literature/HisDarkMaterials'':
** "Anbaric" technology instead of "electric", based on the Arabic word for "amber" rather than the Greek (which is "electrum", also the name of a mineral compound). The books make it clear that it's otherwise ''exactly'' the same as the electricity in our world. TheMovie turned it into Glowing Blue Phlebotinum, however.
** "Chocolatl" is also used instead of "hot chocolate" (based on the Spanish spelling of the Aztec "xocolatl"), while "experimental theology" is used instead of "physics".
** You also hear of ethnic groups such as "Gyptians", which presumably shares its etymology with the real-world "Gypsies" -- a misapprenhension that Romani people came from Egypt.
* In ''Literature/TheHungerGames'', the addictive painkiller in use around Panem is called "morphling" (morphine) and the people addicted to it are called "morphlings".

* 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 everything Tolkien did, [[JustifiedTrope justified]] eventually. In the case of tobacco and potatoes in proto-Europe, the justification was that the Númenóreans, 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.
** It has been suggested that it is ''pipe-weed'' rather than tobacco because Tolkien in [=LotR=] was trying to create a modern English saga, an heroic epic along the lines of Literature/{{Beowulf}}, and made a conscious decision to avoid English words of non-Germanic origins. There are many cases where Tolkien uses words which appear a little archaic, but where the modern equivalent is derived ultimately from Latin via French/Spanish, etc. Of particular note, the Westron names for the months are derived from the old Anglo-Saxon names (as opposed to our current names, which are from Latin). (This doesn't apply to the other languages he invented and used in the book, which are based on a wide range of sources such as Welsh, Finnish, etc. -- but the main body of the text tends to follow this rule.)
** The original 1937 text of ''The Hobbit'' has Gandalf asking Bilbo to "bring out the cold chicken and tomatoes"; this particular reference bothered Tolkien enough in retrospect that when he revised the book, he changed it to "cold chicken and pickles".
** Eventually, in "Of the Lands and Beasts of Númenor", published in The Nature of Middle-earth, Tolkien does call a rabbit a smeerp, or rather a lopold:
--->"... animals which the Númenóreans called lopoldi. These existed in large numbers and multiplied swiftly, and were voracious herbivores; so that the foxes were esteemed as the best and most natural way of keeping them in order ... The lopoldi would appear to have been rabbits, animals which had been quite unknown before in the north-western regions of Middle-earth."
* In the universe of Creator/LarryNiven's story ''Literature/TheMagicGoesAway'', several creatures get this treatment. Unicorns, for example, are referred to as "one-horns".

* Creator/TamoraPierce does this from time to time. Her Literature/TortallUniverse in particular takes leaps and bounds in development from the earliest books to the latest ones, with all kinds of details added to keep what was a very eighties swords-and-sorcery world running smoothly, many of which seem suspiciously modern for their setting. Trouble is, she occasionally forgets what needs renaming and what doesn't. The process of a "new exercise" Kel learns as a page is meticulously described...and turns out to be a push-up. Which Alanna did in her first book, where they were identified by name and not explained. (One {{Justified}} example is "duckmole" for "platypus" -- actually a word coined by British settlers in Australia, since there's not exactly Ancient Greek or Latinization in Tortall.)

* Subverted by ''Anime/PuellaMagiMadokaMagica''. In-universe, {{magical girl}}s are called... magical girls. Not "puella magi." The GratuitousLatin is [[NeverTrustATitle just for the title]].

* ''Fanfic/MassEffectClashOfCivilizations'': Thessia has animals called Shias that the Asari keep as pets, and are the only thing on the entire planet that genetically match them. [[spoiler:In this setting, the Asari are actually a sub-species of humans and shias are dogs]].

* Neal Stephenson's ''Literature/{{Anathem}}'' both uses and inverts this trope. Devices that are obviously cell phones and video cameras respectively are called "jeejahs" and "speelycaptors", but vegetables and animals of the alien planet on which the novel is set are [[CallASmeerpARabbit named for their closest Earth equivalent]] and Earth Anglo units (feet, miles) are used. Inversions include names like 'fraa', which is reference to what monks calling each otheer brother say in Latin, but distorted to remind you that's where the name 'Friar' comes from too. In this case it's like calling a rabbit a Lapidine sclerodont, or a spade a schopfel.

* In Creator/MercedesLackey and James Mallory's ''Literature/TheEnduringFlameTrilogy'', there are shotors, which from the description sounds like they are camels. Similarly, a sighthound is called an ikulas (although this, like [[SdrawkcabName its real-world derivation]], may be the name of a breed, and citrus fruit get {{Phantasy Spelling}}s.

"... animals which the Númenóreans called lopoldi. These existed in large numbers and multiplied swiftly, and were voracious herbivores; so that the foxes were esteemed as the best and most natural way of keeping them in order ... The lopoldi would appear to have been rabbits, animals which had been quite unknown before in the north-western regions of Middle-earth."

* ''WesternAnimation/TheLandBeforeTime'' series has used this trope a lot, but in the past, with dinosaurs. Some talents on the first film explained the simplistic names as an effort at authenticity: dinosaurs 65,000,000 years ago would have no way of knowing modern terms and scientific names. Therefore, everything has incredibly simplistic names, such as "spike tail" for stegosaurus. They even have a word for the sun, "great circle" They actually refer to one species as "rainbow faces," despite the fact that they call rain "sky-water." The later sequels occasionally used the word "saurus" as if everybody knew what it meant. Ozzy the Egg-Stealer in the [[WesternAnimation/TheLandBeforeTimeIITheGreatValleyAdventure second film]] averts this entirely, outright identifying himself as a ''Struthiomimus'' in his VillainSong.

'''Chalmers:''' Uh-huh. Uh, what region? \\
'''Skinner:''' Uhhh, upstate New York. \\

* In the light novel series ''LightNovel/KinosJourney'', author Keiichi Sigsawa includes notes introducing the reader to "persuaders" (guns) and "motorrads" (motorcycles, specifically Hermes). Motorrad also counts as GratuitousGerman.

* In-Universe example in ''Manga/OnePiece'' regarding Haki, a mysterious power that can allow any living thing to use its spiritual energy, but between its rarity to awaken it and difficulty to master, it is most prominent in the New World and among the strongest of pirates and marines. However, it goes by different names in certain islands because they are for the most part isolated from the rest of the world. The people of the Sky Islands refer to the Observation aspect of Haki as Mantra, or "mind rope" and was the first experience of Observation Haki for the Strawhats. Wano Country the Armament aspect is called Ryou, or "flowing sakura", though their practice involves channeling their offensive willpower outward.