Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
alt title(s): Smeerping 
A smeerp wearing the ceremonial jackflappen.
The planet of the Rubber Forehead Aliens is just like Earth (or at least just like the Planet Of Hats)... but we're in space, so regular old Earth flora and fauna just won't do.
Solution: Introduce creatures (or sports, or political institutions, or dishes, or...) that are just like familiar Earth concepts that the audience will recognize but in SPACE, and give them funny names.
Older and more retro series will forgo the funny names entirely, and call everything " Space this" and "Galactic that".
See Part One of the SFWA's Turkey City Lexicon for more detail. Writers are warned against this trope in Orson Scott Card's How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Compare You Mean Xmas, Future Slang and You Are The Translated Foreign Word. See also Space X, Horse Of A Different Color and Hold Your Hippogriffs. Contrast Call A Smeerp A Rabbit, Capital Letters Are Magic.
Examples
Literature
- Jo Walton essays an examination of the various substitutions for "coffee."
 (The article, incidentally, links back to this page.)
- Parodied by The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, which declared that every civilization in the galaxy has some kind of drink — its exact composition varies (often drastically) from race to race and biochemistry to biochemistry — whose name is pronounced something eerily like "gin and tonics".
- "Ouisghian Zodahs" are mentioned in the same paragraph. A page or two later, when Arthur and Ford get their jynnan tonnyx, Arthur finds that his tastes a lot like a whiskey and soda.
- Of course, that whole passage is a reference to something that has got anthropologists and structural linguists very excited in the real world: that just about every culture that worked out how to distill drinkable ethyl alcohol on a widespread basis went on to name the resulting spirit "water of life" - whiskey, aquavit, vodka, ouzo, etc. (look them up!)
- David Weber's Honorverse partly subverts this trope; in a galaxy filled with post-Terran humans, almost every creature ends up named after vaguely similar Terran animals, leading to such creatures as Treecats, the Kodiak Maximus, and the Sphinxian Chipmunk, which is often noted to bear no discernible resemblance to the chipmunk at all. However, they invariably alter folk-sayings to include the "IN SPACE" names, even when the real Terran animal should remain familiar or generic (such as 'cats, short for Treecats, instead of just cats).
- The Dragon's Gold series by Piers Anthony creates new animal names by making a portmanteau out of the names of two similar animals that exist in the real world. For instance, when the book mentions an "allidile," this of course means a creature that is similar to both an alligator and a crocodile. Or, to stick with the rabbit example, the books would probably refer to a rabbit-like creature with a word like "harebit."
- In the foreword of Nightfall, the authors explain that, in order to avert this trope, they are replacing alien measurements and terminology with Earthling equivalents (a move which itself may fall under Literary Agent Hypothesis).
- In The Ringworld Throne, Larry Niven actually calls some tasty rabbit-like critters "smeerps", in a deliberate reference to this trope.
- 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...
- In the Gregor the Overlander series, 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 justified in that its 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 but they don't like to hear it.
- In the "Guardians of Ga'hoole" series, there are a large quantity of words made up in order to make the owls feel more like a unique culture.
- With the exception of Dragonsdawn, all of the novels in the Dragonriders Of Pern series have replaced "horses", "cows", and "dogs" with "runnerbeast", "herdbeast", 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.
- Also, in any novel - with the exception of, again, Dragonsdawn - before All The Weyrs Of Pern, dolphins are called "shipfish".
- All of this, including the inconsistencies, can be read as the natural change in language over hundreds of years, the aversion of Eternal English.
- Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky features arachnoid aliens which are described in very human-like terms. Played with in that it's eventually revealed that they're really way more alien than that; we've been seeing them through the eyes of the brain-slaved human translating crew in orbit.
- George RR Martin's A Song Of Ice And Fire features a few such creatures, and one of the joys of the series is how immediately evocative most of the terms are. One of the best of these is the "lizard-lion", which almost every person who reads the series understands to be an alligator. Others include zorses, puff fish, pricklefish, snow bears, and colorful talking birds.
- The zorse does exist in real life, as a zebra-horse hybrid, although in the book it just seems to refer to a zebra.
- Occasionally it does backfire; this troper immediately assumed the "shadowcats" that live in the far north were snow leopards, but no, apparently they're some kind of made-up fantasy big cats, black with white stripes.
- According to The Areas Of My Expertise, the word "lobster" used to refer to a type of East Coast sea otter (referred to as the Furry Old Lobster) before it was driven to extinction by the New Lobster. Also, during the '20s, "gorilla" was a slang term for a tough guy (this one is actually true), and "mega-chimp" was a slang term for an actual gorilla (this one isn't true).
- The various wolf terms in The Sight, which is made even more confusing when this wolf vocabulary is mixed with its English equivalent. In particular, "varg" and "wolf" are used interchangeably. The author had previously done the same thing for deer in Firebringer: sometimes they were 'deer', sometimes they were 'Herla'. Hedgehogs were occasionally 'brailah'.
- Jayne Castle's ''Harmony'' series features "dust bunnies", which are flat-out called bunnies but definitely have a few quirks above and beyond normal bunnies, such as extra eyes.
- Neal Stephenson's 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 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 other 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 the Nights Dawn sci-fi trilogy, author Peter Hamilton uses the word 'analogue' a lot to describe alien creatures not worth describing in detail (eg. wolf-analogue – a creature similar to a wolf).
- Hamilton's later Void Trilogy (of which only two parts are so far out) describes the (telepathically) genetically engineered animals inside the Void by analogy to Earth animals, quite probably given the origin of human life in the Void the Earth animals from which they evolved.
- Averted in Heinlein's Tunnel In The Sky. The relocated Earthlings pretty much call the alien critters the name of the closest Earthling counterpart. In a variation, one particular creature (described as a stupid-looking jackrabbit) that alternated between stupid and vicious over the course of the year got called a "stobor" half the time, when it was being vicious; this was because of a warning that they had received, to be wary of stobors. They called the creatures "dopey Joes" the rest of the time. As it turns out, "stobor" was more of an archetypal name, describing a danger to be dealt with.
- In The Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien refers to tobacco as "pipe-weed." This may have been to avoid the dissonance of placing New World flora in an Anglo-European Fantasy Counterpart Culture. Though then again, they did have potatoes...
- "Pipe-weed" is definitely tobacco, but, like just about everything Tolkien did, 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.
- It has been suggestion that 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 Beowulf, and made a conscious decision to avoid English words which were not derived from Anglo-Saxon/Germanic/Scandinavian. 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 of course 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".
- The books a mention a pipe-weed causing a "relaxed stupor"; in the movies a deleted scene from Return Of The King features
Merri Merry and Pippin smoking a pipe together and laughing uncontrollably... suggesting something OTHER than tobacco. But then, the movie's not exactly a primary source, a deleted scene being even less authoritative.
- That was back when Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan were still trying to decide exactly what the behavioral effects of pipe-weed should be; they played around with different variations of drunk and high.
- In Trudi Canavan's Black Magician Trilogy and Age of the Five, she renames everything to the point of needing a glossary in the back of every book. She justifies this in an interview by saying that coming across the word 'sheep' during a fantasy novel can kinda spoil things.
- It's handled kind of well in the Black Magician books, as there's a group of criminals who tend to take on the names animals, and these names are usually appropriate. For example, Faren (spider) is very cunning and employs poisons, Ceryni and Ravi (mouse and rat) are physically small but very quick, etc.
- The rabbits of Watership Down have their own Lapine language to describe things that are relevant to being a rabbit. Since the story's setting is recognizable to humans as 20th-century England, many of these words describe things that humans already have names for. Elil are animals that rabbits classify as predators, such as foxes, weasels, and humans; hraka is rabbit droppings; hrududu is anything with a motor, such as an automobile or a tractor.
- Similar to the Watership Down example above, in Tad William's novel Tailchaser's Song the cats ("the folk" as they call themselves) have their own language. Dogs are growlers, rodents are squeakers and squirrels are rikchikchik, birds are fla-fa'az and so on.
- Mercedes Lackey's Silver Gryphon features this gem: "...a box, carved of a fragrant wood that the Haighlei called sadar..." Since the box never comes up again, and the wood it was made out of was not in the least important, why on earth didn't she just say "cedar"? The sense is the same either way — it's a foreign wood to these people — so why obfuscate?
- For some reason, scifi and fantasy authors don't like coffee. Not the drink itself, but the word. They'll do anything to avoid actually saying it.
- Star Wars has "caf tea", or "coffeine" or "caffa" or just "caf", depending on the writer, since most of them don't like or haven't bothered looking up the words already coined. It's a big universe and these all might be distinct beverages or brands, but even so. And also oratay, which is apparently rare. Averted with the highly exotic drink hot chocolate.
- The Valdemar series usually sticks to "strong tea", but occasionally mentions a stimulant drink called "bitteralm". That one's particularly strange, because it sounds like a reference to "bitter almond", which is a real-world nut that contains cyanide and must be carefully treated before it's edible.
- In the Dragonriders Of Pern books, everybody drinks klah - which can't be coffee or tea, since it's made from tree bark and not beans or leaves, but is still a hot, stimulating drink that people have with breakfast.
- And in Randall Garrett's Lord Darcy books coffee is called "caffe" in the Anglo-French Empire. Alcoholic beverages mentioned in the books include oporto (port), xerez (sherry) and ouiskie (whisky). The first two, like "caffe", combine the English and French words; the last is an alternate Anglification of the Gaelic usquebaugh.
- Well, caffe is at least the proper name of the drink, if a foreign/archaic one.
- Averted in Dune, where it's called spice coffee and is literally just coffee with the Spice in it.
- Parodied in Kingdom Of Loathing's "Guano coffee cup" item, where the description says "Wait, what's 'coffee'?"
- In the Mageworlds series, the Mageworlds have a drink called "uffa", and the Adeptworlds have a drink called "cha'a" (which is probably tea, because chá is how the word for tea is pronounced in some Chinese dialects, and many other languages' words for tea are derived from this).
- Lampshaded by Diana Wynne Jones in her story "Nad and Dan adn Quaffy", which is, however, about a science-fiction writer.
- Warhammer40000 uses a wide variety of variants on coffee, including straight caffeine and recaff, among others.
- The Seanchan of The Wheel Of Time have a hot drink called kaf and ride s'redith for elephants.
- 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 justified, being unknown outside the Aiel Waste, this is not so with tabac (this smeerp tends to get lost in translation, anyway).
- Also, there are no slaves in The Wheel Of Time. They have da'covale in Seanchan and gai'shain (not exactly slaves if not captured by Shaido Aiel) in the Waste.
- The people in Dragon Lance drink "tarbean tea".
- In the Chronicles of the Warlands trilogy, it's kavage.
- In Elizabeth Moon's The Deed of Paksenarrion series, the stimulant drink of choice is "sib". It's not clear whether it is more akin to coffee or tea.
- In the Agent of Byzantium Alternate History short stories by Harry Turtledove, there are several examples due to things being discovered earlier and by different people. For example, gunpowder is "hellpowder" because it was first used for creating explosions by sappers dressed in devilish costumes rather than propelling cannonballs, the printing press makes "archetypes", and brandy is yperoinos (Greek fro "superwine") as it was distilled from wine.
- In the Timeline 191 series, a fictional character with the last name Blackford is president during the Great Depression instead of Herbert Hoover, resulting in shanty towns of unlucky stockholders being called Blackfordburgs rather than Hoovervilles. Also, with the Russian Revolution a dismal failure, the Molotov cocktail is renamed "Featherston fizz" after the series' Hitler equivalent. Finally, tanks are called "barrels" because, paralleling the origin of the Real Life term, they were first made in a building labeled "the Barrel Works".
- Although it's not exactly a completely different world, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix 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.
- Similarly, instantaneous travel is called apparation instead of the Muggle sci-fi word "teleportation", and animated corpses are inferi, not "zombies".
- In Diane Duane's Star Trek novel The Empty Chair, we see the sentence "like a conjurer with a smeerp up his sleeve."
- In the Myth Adventures novels, Skeeve's homeworld of Klah is populated by such portmanteau animals as spider-bears or fox-squirrels, and Skeeve himself is often bewildered by references to mundane animals. ("What's a cow?") This running gag is built upon further from time to time, as when Skeeve is surprised to learn that steaks don't come from animals called "steaks" — "fish" comes from "fish" or "chicken" from "chickens", after all — or when he starts to ask "What's a wombat?", then stops because his imagination suggests it's something too scary to want to know about.
- The far-future Earth of A. A. Attanasio's novel Radix is rife with these, the most jarring being the standard currency, "zords." (No, not that kind.) A fantastic book by a brilliant author who was apparently unaware of this trope, or at least that sometimes tropes really ARE bad.
- Played with in The Book of the New Sun. e.g. noblemen and cavalry troopers ride on animals called "destriers." Readers might assume this is just the author using a fancy medieval word for "horse," until they learn that the destriers have claws, eat meat and generally seem to be some kind of genetically-engineered jaguar.
- Tamora Pierce does this from time to time. Her Tortall Universe 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.
- Timothy Zahn, in his Star Wars Expanded Universe novels, generally tries, with the exception of hot chocolate, to keep to this trope, since the 'verse is very not Earth and involves humans, but few other Earth animals. He tends not to describe nonhumans in great detail, but will mention avians in the brush or hostile canid creatures. This does lead to some readers wondering how "avian" is less an Earthism than "bird", and why he'll use "snake".
- The kind of science fantasy that gets lumped under the "Steam Punk" label likes to smeerp technology:
- His Dark Materials uses "anabaric" technology instead of "electric", based on the Arabic word for "amber" rather than the Greek. While the books make it clear that it's exactly the same as electricity in our world, The Movie turned it into Glowing Blue Phlebotinum.
- "Chocolatl" is also used instead of "chocolate" (based on the spanish spelling of the aztec "xocolatl"), while "philosophy" is used instead of chemistry/physics.
- China Mieville uses "chymistry" in his New Corbuzon setting, though this may fall more into the "Magick With A K" category.
- I summon the Wiki Magic for more examples!
- Parodied a lot in Discworld. In The Discworld Companion, Terry Pratchett explains that every young sci-fi/fantasy writer (presumably including himself) starts out carefully avoiding references to, e.g. "Toledo steel", but sooner or later throws their hands up and cries "What the hell?"
- In particular he likes using terms that should not exist in a different world, and then justifying them with a bizarre parallel explanation. For example, "Pavlovian response" also exists in Discworld not because it was discovered by a man called Pavlov, but because the experiment involved the dog eating a strawberry meringue when the bell was rung.
- In Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Below the Root and its sequels, creatures that rather obviously appear to be rabbits and monkeys are respectively called "lapans" and "simas." Other creatures such as tree bears keep their recognizable names. A lot of the special language is based on German and French words. Snyder implied in the first book that the inhabitants of the planet Green-sky are descendants of an Earth colony founded by German and French scientists (and at least one Israeli) with a large group of war orphans. She includes some credible examples of linguistic drift and coinage.
Comic Books
- Elf Quest 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, Terry Pratchett parodies this in Pyramids by using the term "camels of the sea" (given that camels are "ships of the desert"...)
- Cadillacs And Dinosaurs takes place in a future where a cataclysm has both destroyed most of human civilization, and brought the dinosaurs back to life. The survivors, having no record the the dinosaurs' actual names, have come up with their own names for them, such as "Shivat" and "Rock-Hopper."
Film
- The My Favorite Martian movie has the "electron accelerator", which is nothing but Technobabble for a car's alternator.
- Wookieepedia has an exhaustive list of this trope as it applies to Star Wars. Dice, for example, are called "chance cubes". ...Although actual dice with pips instead of colors have appeared and gone by "dice" in the EU.
- Penny Arcade recently complained that Star Wars Expanded Universe writers take this kind of thing to ridiculous extremes:
Gabe: "These goddamned Star Wars writers just don't know when to stop. This jackass just said that something can go 'through a ferrocrete bunker like a neutrino through plasma.' I get it, man. It says 'Star Wars' on the cover. I know I'm reading about 'Star Wars'. It's like, do they not have butter in space? Or hot knives to cut it with?"
- "Star Wars" examples Galactic Body Wash. (Liquid Soap in SPAAACE!!!)
- Star Wars Expanded Universe is a grab bag of names - looking at alcoholic drinks alone, there's lomin-ale, Corellian Whiskey(with brands like Whyren's Reserve), lum, juri juice, A Walk In The Phelopean Forest(even the bartender doesn't know what's with the name), Savareen Brandy, and a lot more.
- Kevin Smith once said in an interview on his having written for Superman that the producers asked him to call the director's demanded Giant Spider something other than a spider. He suggested Thanagarian Snarebeast (Thanagar being Hawkman's home planet), and they told him to go with it.
- "He just took two hundred and forty-eight Space Bucks for lunch, gas, and tolls!"
- The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra has two aliens from Marva. They have "cranberroids" instead of cranberries, and "linbooba" instead of cherries. Picnics are called "cooty-lana".
- Inverted in Avatar, where the humans are perfectly cabable of pronouncing fairly easy names of animals et cetera the Na'vi gave them on the planet of Pandora, but decide to create new names for them anyway.
Live Action TV
Tabletop RPG
- Advanced Dungeons And Dragons 2nd edition had a campaign setting entitled Spelljammer (D&D IN SPACE) which used this trope frequently, most famously with the "Giant Space Hamster". This creature is not only exactly what it sounds like — a hamster larger than a human — but is also hyper-intelligent.
- Spelljammer also had the scro, who were Space Orcs.
- In the Baldurs Gate games, this is homaged. The somewhat unbalanced ranger Minsc has an animal companion, Boo, which he claims is a "miniature giant space hamster", though it looks and acts for all the world like a common hamster.
- In D&D 4th Edition, there are monsters called the Macetail Behemoth and the Bloodspike Behemoth, which have an uncanny resemblance to an ankylosaur and a stegosaur respectively.
- The 4E names may be inspired by Eberron, where halflings name all dinosaurs this way. The dragons also have their own names for the dinosaurs, so every species has three different names. There's a chart in one of the books to help keep things straight.
- Exalted has hints of this as well, with species such as the Raiton (raven), Siaka (shark) and Austrech (guess).
- To be fair, this is more than filing off the serial numbers. Raitons are described as scaled, archaeopteryx-esque things, Siaka are more like megalodons than modern sharks, and the Austrech is a vicious clawed predator (to be completely honest, for several years This Troper didn't get the joke and read it as "oss-trekh").
- White Wolf games in general do this a lot, especially both editions of the World Of Darkness line. Each supernatural faction seems to have multiple terms for themselves, the other supernatural groups, and normal humans. E.g., they're not vampires, they're Kindred, Damned, the Get of Caine, Servants of the Wyrm, etc. They're not mages, they're Awakened, Enlightened, Reality Deviants, Willworkers, etc. They're not humans, they're kine, canaille, Sleepers, Children of the Weaver, etc. The factions with long-established histories like the vampires and mages tend to include a generational divide in terminology, with the elder vampires and mages using traditional terms often derived from Latin, French or German, while the younger ones use a form of modern street-slang.
Theater
- Played for laughs in A. A. Milne's play The Ugly Duckling. The princess' suitor is required to answer a riddle to win her hand. The king gives him the answer in advance, but the riddle is changed at the last minute and the none-too-bright suitor answers "A dog" instead of "A cat". His servant (the princess' real suitor in disguise) quickly explains that in their country, "dog" is another word for "cat". Spoofing this trope even further, he adds that there are places where the creature is known as a "hippopotamus".
- A. A. Milne loves this trope. It's prevalent in Winnie the Pooh but distinction between real animals and stuffed ones is kind of lost in the Disney adaptations.
Video Games
- The Baten Kaitos 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...
- The Interactive Fiction game The Gostak, by Carl Muckenhoupt, is based entirely on this trope: you are thrust into a world where not only nouns but even the entire vocabulary of common verbs is replaced with a fantasy dialect. The grammar is still recognizably English, but the main puzzle of the game is working out the game's alien vocabulary.
"Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds. Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them. But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you."
- Said game is clearly a deliberate 'spin-off' from the 1930 science-fiction story The Gostak and the Doshes, by Dr. Miles Breuer, in which 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 not set in outer space, The Legend Of Zelda series consistently refers to common clucking barnyard fowl as "Cuccos". One character even refers to a cowardly character as a "Cucco". It's less out-there than most examples, since it's based on the Japanese equivalent of "cock-a-doodle-doo" (kokkekokkoh! —> kokko).
- Mind you, those things are a bit different from an ordinary chicken. The series has other instances of this trope, such as the Keese.
- Of course, Keese are also different from real bats in several ways, most important of which is that real bats cannot survive extended periods of time on fire.
- The Fire Emblem games Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn refer to regular humans as "beorc." To make matters worse, the laguz (a race of humanoid shapeshifters) use the word "human" as an insult.
- Skies Of Arcadia is full of either specially named animals or combinations of animals we'd think of as normal. Rabbats, Kotekas (hybrid chicken/crows), Icebirds (the only birds in the game that can't fly), Huskras, Arcwhales...
- Not to mention the Delphinus, which is named after an extinct variant of dolphins with wings...
- Final Fantasy XII is an exceedingly egregious abuser of this trope. No, humans can't just be humans. They're "humes." Those techniques you use in battle? "Technicks." Oh, and that isn't magic you're using against your enemies; they're "magicks." Strangely enough, though, creatures based on real-life animals usually keep their real names - wolves are wolves, rabbits are rabbits, etc. And yet something as simple as a manufactured crystal is actually "manufacted."
- Final Fantasy XI has the cutesy name “rarabs” for rabbit-like creatures, though that’s only their name around Windurst (they’re called rabbits or hares in pretty much all other contexts).
- These creatures have some distinctly non-rabbit-like traits, such as long, rat-like tails, huge, almost bug-like eyes, and a lack of forelimbs, which makes the ones called rabbits and hares examples of another trope.
- Tall, slender humanoid races with pointy ears are usually called "Elves", but Final Fantasy XI chooses to call them Elvaan.
- Fallout calls its ubiquitous bovines "Brahmins" instead of cows, and "Brahminshit" has apparently entered the lexicon as a replacement for a more familiar term. The new name might be justified, though, as the Brahmins are horribly mutated monster cows with two heads and cancerous udders.
- A Brahman is a breed of zebu cattle.
- Nintendo referred to all of its cartridge-based media, from the Nintendo Entertainment System and all the way to the Game Boy Advance, as "Game Paks" (or "cassettes" in Japanese).
- Only a person who has played Ultima Underworld II can adequately describe to you what it means to use a Delgnizator on two Control Crystals to skup a new Bliy Skup Ductosnore.
- In the MMO Space Cowboys Online, also known as Flysis, also known as Air Rivals, also known as Ace Online, humans are called DECA and eagles are called Rocks.
- Maybe they meant the Roc, weird oversized eagle-like birds who likes to, for no discernible reason, carry rocks and drop them onto unsuspecting objects.
- Cave Story features a race of Funny Animals that look for all the world like giant rabbits. They are exclusively referred to as Mimigas.
- Ground Control and its sequel have Terradynes (Tanks and tracked vehicles) Aerodynes (Planes), Helidynes (a different kind of aircraft)and Hoverdynes (Hovering tanks)
Webcomics
- The Cyantian Chronicles: Acid Whip = Dragon. Equid = Horse. Just don't call the sentient cyantians "animals", they consider it a major insult. And just look up "Mounty" in the Shivaewiki to find the alternate names for the various terran felines in their anthropomorphic cyantian forms.
- xkcd comments on this in strip 483.
- Erfworld parodies this with its "dwagons," "gwiffons," "spidews," and other such beasts. Main character Parson Gotti, from Earth, explains to his boss Stanley that he's used to "dragons" and "griffons" on Earth. Stanley replies that they sound stupid, especially "Earth."
- Sorcery 101 decided to call Chinese Sipanese even though before now one thought this was our world with werewolves and vampires and mages and demons.
- Pretty much every region in that comic has a different rename. UPH for USA, Terra for England, and so on.
Western Animation
- The Jetsons did this a lot, despite us being tired of it after The Flintstones did it first.
- The Land Before Time 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 Viewers Are Morons 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". Of course, having dinosaurs call themselves in names that were given to them millions of years after they were extinct would make little sense.
- Of course, anyone that thinks the target audience would be unable to cope has NEVER been dressed down by an 8-year-old on matters paleological, and how one's knowlege is AT LEAST five years out of date... If anything, the terminology change is to keep the film from looking dated by its own naming conventions.
- One exception is 'sharp tooth' which eventually is generically applied to any carnivorous animal, though from a herbivore's point of the view this is probably sufficient....
- In Looney Tunes, Marvin the Martian's weapon of choice is the Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator, which to the untrained eye looks just like an ordinary stick of dynamite.
- The original name "Uranium Pu-36" changed to "Illudium Q-36 " in subsequent cartoons. Pu is the chemical symbol for Plutonium. So I'm guessing that either Uranium Pu-36 didn't sound "spacey" enough or they wished to not have kids think of nuclear weapons whenever it was referenced.
- Also, the device is quite capable of blowing up the planet Earth (or so I've heard). This particular smeerp might look like a rabbit, but if so, then it's (perhaps) no ordinary rabbit.
- Chowder does this with food. Butter is now "blutter", coriander is now "Snoriander", pizza is now "feetsa", etc.
- Lampshaded once when Chowder gained super-intelligence and realized these are just made-up words on some cartoon.
- Chowder is inconsistent with this trope, forsaking it when their substitute names would make a joke confusing or less funny. For example, there is an exam for apprentice chefs (i.e. Chowder) called the BL Ts... which stands for Beginner Learning Tests. However, Chowder still runs around, repeating "Bacon, lettuce and TOMATO! Bacon, lettuce, and TOMATO!" and it's never lampshaded.
- The Simpsons: Behold, the two headed dog, born with only one head! And behold, out of the mists of time, the legendary Esquilax, a horse with the head of a rabbit, and the body....of a rabbit.
- The Australians had a weird name for bullfrogs (though they thought "bullfrog" was a weird name). Anyone remember what it was?
- —>"That's weird! I'd have called them chuzzwazzers!"
- Avatar The Last Airbender: Although not considered "A different planet", this series has tons of different animal hybrids (duck turtles, platypus bear, badger mole, etc.), along with plants and food (sea prunes, ocean kumquats). The Fridge Logic of naming animals after other ones that don't exist in their world is lampshaded when the group went to Ba Sing Sae and received an invitation from the Earth King to celebrate the birthday of his pet "Bear", and are bewildered that it's "just a bear".
- There's also the Herbalist's pet which appears to just be a regular cat, though no one notices.
- Then you have the penguins...
- The Snorks is a great example of this. They have Shellovisions, not Televisions. Things are changed to be underwater related.
|
|
