Could the weird word being that language's word for whatever they're describing be counted as a justification?
Edit: Okay, apparently that's mentioned
Edited by MrStranger616
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I'm not sure the Mimigas from Cave Story should be here. They are not common rabbits, they are human-sized sentient rabbit-like creatures. I think the difference warrants their different name. This complaint was made before in the archived discussion.
Edited by TwilightVulpine The opinion above may change without notice. By answering it you agree with those terms. Hide / Show Replies
All animals are sentient, dude. There's a difference between sentience and sapience.
Seems like the page quote is more Hold Your Hippogriffs, really.
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They replaced it with the steamed hams dialogue.
Edited by MrStranger616
In the examples for Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, Zemai for corn is given as it being an anagram of maize. I believe the more likely linguistic explanation is that corn (maize) is the species Zea mays.
I'm not sure if the trope is just for flora and fauna or for everything in general, if the latter then I'd suggest a real life addition: The paintball community in the USA has recently started calling paintball guns "markers" for some unexplicable reason, probably to skirt around gun laws or something. Before that fad everyone just called them guns so it's not like they were originally "markers" or anything.
Well, "recently". I think it started in 2011 or something. But still, I think it might be a good addition.
Edited by sienihemmo
One of the examples lists Larry Niven's 'Ringworld Throne' as a direct reference to this trope. Considering that the book was published before TV Tropes, wouldn't it be the other way around? From what I can tell, that even seems to be the trope namer.
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A direct reference to the trope doesn't mean a direct reference to TV Tropes - the page is named after an entry in the Turkey City Lexicon, which dates from 1988, and attributes it to James Blish (although Vonda N. Mcintyre's "Pitfalls of Writing SF and Fantasy
" attributes it to Damon Knight, who was also involved in the Lexicon). Whoever coined it, the phrase was well-known by SF writers before Niven wrote Ringworld Throne.
The translators who created the King James Version of the Bible apparently did this with a number of Hebrew words: "wild ox" -> "unicorn"; "jackal" -> "dragon"; making this trope Older Than Steam.
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I figured the trope involved calling animals names that are totally made up, but I see your point.
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Suggestion : Call A Rabbit A Smeerp needs a special subtrope for the Alternate History genre. Logically, in a world with a different history than ours (especially one that diverged long ago), there would be lots of alternate names for many things, both mundane and specialised (for instance, cars being "Locomobiles", "Motocarriages", etc.). This trope pops up in the genre very often (all the time, really), so it's not just some flight of fancy of a particular author. On the other hand, a pure "smeerp" implies laziness or bad writing on part of the author. "A smeerp" is a "smeerp" even though there's virtually no reason to call it like that, while "kineto-tube" instead of "television" is pretty reasonable if the story is set in a world, which diverged from our history before television as we know it was invented and named. A true alternate term meerly adds flavour to a particular alternate history, while a "smeerp" is just that - a "smeerp". Think about it.
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That's really more of a YKTTW topic.
See you in the discussion pages.
Would it be inappropriate to list "real life" examples based on words or phrases that a person from a couple of centuries earlier would call examples of this trope? Like "why call Reichsmarks 'Euros'? If it's meant to be generic to the whole continent, they would just be marks." or "for some reason, half the time they talk about something particularly oversized, they say 'jumbo', instead of just extra-large."
"Pikkards are actually not an example, though they're easily mistaken for such. Despite taking on the same role in the game world as pigs do in real life — both as livestock, and in phrases like "pikkard sty" —they're actually a large rodent-like mammal somewhat resembling a hamster or marmot."
I thought the pikkards from Ys were obviously guinea pigs; at least as obvious as rhebolls being wolves and quias being squirrels :P
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