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Jerry "It's not a purse! It's European!"
— Seinfeld: The Reverse Peephole
A joke, especially in Sit Coms, wherein a character consistently refers to something embarrassing (or effeminate) by what they hope is a more dignified name.
See also Unusual Euphemism when very unpleasant things are concerned. Compare and contrast with Insistent Terminology. Real Men Wear Pink is the standard subversion.
Examples:
Anime
- In a sort of meta-example, fans always insist on referring to Char Aznable's Ace Custom color scheme as "red" when, to many people, it looks suspiciously pink, especially in the original TV series. Never commented on in-show, but an occasional source of minor Flame Wars in the fandom.
- Sunrise, the company responsible for the Gundam franchise, may have been having some fun with this in their latest effort, Gundam00. When one of the show's aces (in this case a female) receives their own "Ace Custom" mech, it's very blatantly pink, and it is called the "Tieren Taozi". Taozi is, for the uninformed, Chinese for "peach".
- This troper isn't familiar with the Gundam franchise but believes Appleseed Ex Machina may be making fun of this example by giving Deunan Knute a pink LandMate prototype.
- Then there's Akito Tenkawa's Aestivalis in Martian Successor Nadesico, which is very blatently pink, in both the show and merchandise. It is never commented on, but is especially obvious when all the female pilots (who always outnumber the male) have decidedly more masculine colors.
Commercials
- Played perfectly straight in a conversation between two bison (yes, bison) in a telephone company commercial a few years back for camera phone support:
Bison 1: Is that a purse?
Bison 2: No! It's a murse! It's for men! It's European!
Bison 1: Uh-huh...
Bison 2: Look, my girlfriend got it for me and I have to use it a while. Let's just keep this to ourselves, okay?
Bison 1: Okay...
*camera phone clicks*
Bison 2: What was that?
- A Progressive Insurance commercial has saleslady Flo telling a couple that Progressive can compare its rate with those of other top companies, thereby sparing them from spending all day shopping around to compare.
Flo: (to husband) And no more holding her purse!
Wife: (irritated) It's a European shoulder bag.
Husband: (sheepish) It was a gift.
Film
Comic Books
- In an X-Men comic Jean Grey asks Jubilee if she still has nightmares. Jubilee responds that nightmares are for babies; she has "traumatic evening episodes".
- This
 example on superdickery.com shows how Robin doesn't even want to think about Batman wearing pink.
Literature
- In Figgs & Phantoms, the main feature of the Alternate Dimension is a pink palm tree, which its lone resident insists is coral, not pink.
Live Action TV
- Trope namer: In Seinfeld, Jerry buys a "European carry-all" from the J. Peterman catalogue — but essentially, it's a purse.
- "It's not a purse! It's European!"
- This could also be a Shout Out to a dialect difference. In Britain (which is English-speaking Europe), a purse isn't a "carry-all", it's considerably smaller. To a European, a bag like that is... a bag, or a handbag. Though the joke could be tweaked by referring to a recent fashion for "manbags".
- In Friends, Ross refers to his shirt as being "sort of a faded salmon color", when it's actually pink.
- Friends also had an episode where Joey, based on fashion advice from Rachel started carrying a "unisex bag". Everyone else called it a purse.
- In Everybody Loves Raymond, Robert insists for several episodes that a bull gored him in the "upper thigh".
- In All In The Family, Mike defends his habit of carrying what Archie calls a purse by insisting it's actually a "shoulder-bag for men".
- In Stargate Atlantis, Rodney insists that he did not faint, but "passed out from manly hunger." By the way, Rodney's actual first name is Meredith.
- Which is actually a Welsh male name, meaning great lord, that only switched to being a popular female name relatively recently.
- The Funny Foreigner trope in full effect. Considering that Americans have this quirk of giving male names, like Nikita, to girls... you know, glass house, stones....
- Yeah, but Rodney's Canadian.
- Yeah, but Canadians suffer from close proximity to Americans and American cultural perceptions.
- In another episode, Rodney started to say that he was "escaping", but quickly changed it to "effecting a strategic retreat".
- Likely homaging Dr. Smith from Lost in Space who said the same thing.
- In Neds Declassified School Survival Guide, Ned carries a pillow- an ordinary bedroom pillow, with plain white pillowcase- around in "Guide to: Friends Moving". He refers to it as a "cushion protector", and it saves him from several head injuries and a Pie In The Face .
- And his 'leftie-shirt', which was a blouse.
- In That70s Show, Eric has a collection of G. I. Joe and Star Wars toys. He calls them "action figures", everybody else calls them "dolls".
- From a sketch in Monty Pythons Flying Circus:
Miss Bladder: I'm not a courtesan!
Biggles (Graham Chapman): Courtesan? Oh, oh, aren't we grand? Harlot's not good enough for us, eh? Paramour, concubine, fille de joie, that's what we're not. Listen to me, my fine fellow, you are a bit of tail. Algy says so.
Miss Bladder: And how would he know?
Biggles: Are you calling my comrade-in-arms Algy a fairy?
Miss Bladder: Fairy? Poof's not good enough for you. He's got to be a bleedin' fairy!
- And what about Brave Sir Robin? He's not running away. He's not!
- In a Scrubs episode, Cox meets a doctor who likes to collect dolls. Did I say dolls? It's a collectible!
- In Malcolm In The Middle, Dewey carries a handbag that he insists is a bookbag. When a group of kids make fun of him for it, he hits them with it. This is quite effective as he had filled it with bricks.
- In Star Trek, the Command officers (or Security/Engineer in Star Trek The Next Generation) don't wear yellow: they wear Gold uniforms.
Newspaper Comics
- In Bloom County, Opus takes a job as a garbageman and demands to be called a "waste management artisan." Milo refuses to do this, until Opus successfully argues that if Ronald Reagan's arms shipments to Iran can be called "goodwill gifts", he can be a "waste management artisan."
- In The Boondocks A strip has Granddad defending his "Man-Bag" as being manly in a strip introducing the Unusual Euphemism "Brokeback", for something of dubious masculinity.
Professional Wrestling
- Commentators refer to groin shots (particularly unintentional ones) as "hits to the lower abdomen". Possibly justified, as actual groin shots are supposed to end the match immediately.
Video Games
- In Escape from Monkey Island, Guybrush requisitions a ship, only to be given a bright pink vessel called The Dainty Lady. If he complains to the Harbormistress, she will suggest other terms for the color, such as "magenta." In a bit of a subversion, one of her suggestions, "Flaming Popsicle," is even more embarrassing.
- In edutainment title Recess in Greece, the protagonist (a monkey named Morgan) ends up in a kid-friendly (complete with the necessary bowdlerization and ADHD-tempting hilarious animations when you click on everything) version of The Iliad, with Morgan in the role of Odysseus. The moment after he goes through his daydream time-warp, he lands outside the Parthenon, where a Greek statue talks to him. Morgan soon asks, "Why am I wearing a dress?". The statue immediately chastises him: "It's not a dress! It's a chiton! You'd know that if you were paying attention in class!"
- In Fallout 3, former childhood bully Butch becomes the hairdresser for Vault 101 (which is the job he got on his G.O.A.T. exam), though he insists that he's not a hairdresser, but a barber.
Web Animation
- In the Halo-based machinima series Red vs. Blue, Donut spends most of the first season wearing a suit of pink armor, which he insists is "light-ish red".
Webcomics
Western Animation
Real Life
- Nintendo is sometimes chastised for initially making purple the primary color of the Gamecube console. Some defend this decision by arguing that the Gamecube isn't purple, but indigo.
- Assuming most kids were in science class this is accurate.
- Likewise the "clear pink" version of the original GBA was red, you hear me! Red!
- Nintendo themselves went through a period of referring to all colors by non-standard names. The aforementioned pink GBA was "fuchsia" and the orange GC was "spice" for no clear reason.
- Try Polar White, Onyx, Cobalt, or Metallic Rose DS Lite colors on for size.
- "Spice (Melange)" Gamecube, I should think is the suggestion here.
- With the slight caveat that the spice was described as violet or blue.
- No, spice (melange) was, in fact, orange.
- This editor vaguely recalls that bastion of conformity-for-nonconformists, Hot Topic, peddling a denim skirt to teenage male emo kids as a "one-legged pant."
- They're still there, at a mere fifty-eight dollars (Update: They've been dropped to twenty-eight dollars. And are presently sold out).
- It doesn't seem to be sold any more. Sad, really. It was the perfect thing for Hot Topic. Oh well...
- There are new skates now called "side-by-sides" that have, get this, two wheels in front and two wheels in back! Anyone born before 1992 may remember that these hip, new alternatives to inlines were called "rollerskates" for much of the 20th century.
- This kind of thing is more properly called a retronym.
- The English national football team famously dropped their traditional Red away shirt in favour of what they called Indigo-Blue (but appeared somewhat grey) in the mid-90s.
- Two Sundays out of every year, Catholics celebrate Mass with rose-colored vestments and hangings. Two Sundays out of every year, a priest of this troper's acquaintance begins his homily by explaining that the robe he is wearing is rose, not pink.
- this troper's priest called it 'macho salmon'.
- It's not a doll. It's an ACTION FIGURE!!
- The matter needed to be decided so in 2003 the court of international trade defined action figures as "nonhuman creatures". [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toy_Biz_v._United_States] Which says nothing of their construction materials or intended demographic which usually defines which term is used. Not to mention Barbie's (a doll) impossible anatomy, it's a wonder she hasn't been classified as a "nonhuman", but that's enough commentary out of me for now.
- Take That, Mattel!
- There are some anime fans who will get very annoyed if you refer to what they are watching as "cartoons"... then again, considering the stigma of the word "cartoon"
- It gets hilarious when you consider what "anime" actually means. It's French for "cartoon".
- Actually "anime" in that context is a shortening of animeeshon, the Japanese pronunciation of "animation." And the French animé more literally just means "animated." So, related, yes, a stupid distinction, yes, but not actually the same word, strictly speaking.
- The very same stigma makes western comic fans call them Graphic novels.
- Many people believe that cartoon just refers to Western Animation in general. Others believe cartoon refers to a specific style of animation. This troper still isn't sure just what the definition is.
- If you call that copy of Watchmen a Comic Book, you throw yourself into the Animation Age Ghetto. If you call it a Graphic Novel, you are seen as needlessly pretentious. There's really no way to win.
- Trade Paperback or TPB?
- This Troper and his friends are actively trying to take back the term Comic Book.
- And it gets really complicated if you point out that Watchmen was published as a limited series of comic books with no intention on the creators' part to have it packaged in the familiar collection.
- This is particularly funny because while most people today would associate 'novel' with prose published in volumes (and therefore potentially argue for 'graphic novel' to be used for comics collected in volumes), most commercial novels used to be serialised and therefore published as periodicals, only being collected in omnibus volumes if they proved sufficiently popular. In essence, any argument that goes, "It's not a comic book, it's a graphic novel because it's published in one volume" is probably historically inaccurate.
- Every modern product will refuse to be a simple color. Just try to match the paint on your car by looking up "green". There are no "green" cars sold. NONE. No "orange" cars, but we do have "Tangerine".
- It's not a skirt, it's a kilt.
- Stewardesses are flight attendants nowadays.
- People who live in moose-heavy areas of North America are probably all familiar with news reports of tourists (usually male) being injured in the "upper thigh" by the gigantic ungulates. Since most moose injuries occur after the victim turns and runs away from the animal he was annoying most people understand what the euphemism really refers to.
- This troper was informed by her history teacher that the United States Marines have never once retreated. They have, however, made strategic withdrawals.
- Similarly, there are no ex-Marines. They can retire, switch services, be discharged, ect. but once a Marine, always a Marine.
- I was told that there are no wars anymore. War is illegal. We do have some 'armed conflicts' though.
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