Needs Clarification: Word Salad Title

I started a YKTTW thread called "Dropped Title" for works whose titles bear no obvious relationship to their content (basically Non-Appearing Title for everything other than songs). Some people have argued that this is already covered by Word Salad Title: Examples that Make Just As Much Sense In Context, but I'm not sure. Primarily, my problem is that Word Salad Title seems to be about names that sound silly or weird. The first line of the description defines it as:

"The persistent practice of using titles that look like someone mashed together random words lifted out of an English dictionary."

In contrast, I'm interested in a page not only for titles that sound random and weird, but for any title that doesn't seem to fit the work's content.

Current examples:

• Twelfth Night
• 8 1/2
• Angela's Ashes
• Blame!!
• Bleach
• Chariots Of Fire
• Eureka Seven
• The movie of The Grapes Of Wrath
• The His Dark Materials trilogy
• It Happened One Night
• 'The Two Towers'
• The Name Of The Rose
• Peanuts
• Reservoir Dogs
• Straw Dogs
• Ulysses

Could all of those be listed under Word Salad Title? If so, I will add them. If not, can I create a new page for them?

edited 18th Jun '11 1:09:58 AM by BlueIceTea

I think these qualify as word salad titles, but it might be worth it to consider reworking the definition of a word salad title.

Also, FWIW, Two Towers wouldn't qualify as it very directly references something from the body of the work: the title refers to the towers of Mordor and Isengard (Barad-dur and Orthanc respectively).

They're not Word Salad Titles, because they make perfect sense, they just aren't connected to the plot of the works. (Ulysses is a borderline case, since if you squint, you can see how the plot very distantly follows the plot of The Odyssey: Bloom ogling a girl on the beach corresponds to Odysseus meeting Nausicaa, the brothel scene corresponds to Circe's island, etc.)

Also, The Two Towers standing for Barad-dur and Orthanc was an invention of the film. Here's the Word of God on the matter:

"I am not at all happy about the title 'the Two Towers'. It must if there is any real reference in it to Vol II refer to Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol. But since there is so much made of the basic opposition of the Dark Tower and Minas Tirith, that seems very misleading." (The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien No 143, dated 1954)

edited 18th Jun '11 5:00:39 AM by DoktorvonEurotrash

Twelfth Night isn't a Word Salad Title. It was written to be performed as part of a Twelfth Night celebration which was part of the Christmas holiday at the time. Knowing a little history makes these make more sense.

^ Indeed. The original title was What You Will. Twelfth Night was only added as a foretitle because another popular playwright (John Marston) premiered his own play also called "What You Will" while shakespeare was still writing his.

Bleach refers to the Ichigo's hair. Most of these titles do actually make sense if you stop looking at them so literally.

Blue Ice Tea, for future reference, you are no supposed to put spaces between the words in the "Article" box when creating a new conversation. This will make the top link link to the Home Page instead.

Also, I don't think that a single, or double, word title can count as word salad.

And doesn't it usually mean that the title makes no sense out of context? Then why is "The Two Towers" on there? Is is illogical to assume that a story can involve two towers?

edited 18th Jun '11 10:04:28 AM by SalFishFin

"At worst, they will be as meaningless as "Super Punk Octo Pudding Gas Mark Seven", and at best, they will just cryptically allude to the show's premise or characters while trying to make a clever Western pop-culture reference. Basically, Gratuitous English as applied to show names."

Most of those fit. The problem is, when it was still called Super Punk Octo Pudding Gas Mark Seven, it was about anime and the definition still kind of shows. It's not necessary for it to be more than one word to be one, although longer one's are more likely to be unambiguous examples.

The Two Towers similarly makes sense. In fact, it makes too much sense, because there's many sets of two towers that influence the story (Bara-Dur / Orthanc. Minas Morgul / Minas Tirith. Minas Morgul / Bara-Dur)

^^ One word isn't "word salad". Two might be if they're completely unrelated to each other.

Here's the definition of "word salad" from Wikipedia: "Word salad is a mixture of random words that, while arranged in phrases that appear to give them meaning, actually carry no significance. The words may or may not be grammatically correct, but the meaning is hopelessly confused."

Word Salad is a pre-existing term, if that helps.

Edit: Ninja'd

edited 18th Jun '11 11:13:27 AM by troacctid

Besides that, it's really hard to put two words together and have them not make any sort of sense.

So, the consensus seems to be...

There doesn't seem to be any consensus.

I definitely see that there's a lot of overlap between Word Salad Title and what I'm proposing, but I also see strong arguments that they're different. For the record, here's what I had in mind for my proposed trope:

This trope is for situations where the name of a work bears no obvious relationship to its content. It's essentially Non-Appearing Title for works other than songs. Its defining characteristic is that no explanation of the title is given within the work itself. Word of God doesn't count. Background literary knowledge doesn't count. If you could read/watch/listen to the entire content of a work without discovering what the title means, it qualifies. Unless it's a song.

My idea in suggesting the page was not only to keep a record of these works, but also to provide a space where people could post explanations of the titles (if known). That way, anyone confused by a title could go to the page and learn it's meaning (if it had one).

Maybe the best option would be to create a new page for my trope, with a note saying that overly-bizarre names should be filed under Word Salad Title. At the same time, some of the current examples under Word Salad Title should be removed and transferred to the new page: Reservior Dogs, Straw Dogs, The Room, etc. don't really fit the current definition.

Doktorvon Eurotrash:

Wow! When I first read the books I assumed the second tower was Cirith Ungol, but everyone else seemed to think it was either Minas Morgul or Barad Dûr. It's nice to know that assumption wasn't completely nutty.

shimaspawn:

Yeah, I know, but they're still enigmatic and bear some explanation.

Heatth:

Oops. Sorry.

edited 20th Jun '11 3:01:25 AM by BlueIceTea

I see no arguments in this thread that claim what you're describing is substantially different from a certain type of Word Salad Title. Mostly, it appears to be getting bogged down in what the definition of both of them are (which is more or less unavoidable when discussing examples of this trope)

Personally, I think the definition of Word Salad Title is definitely broad enough to include what you're describing, and all of the examples you've given either fit on the page or are just normal titles. Please remember that it's really very common for the connection between a work and its title to require a little thinking. Having a 'less than obvious' connection is just too broad a definition to make a useful trope.

Consider these, some of which are currently examples and some of which aren't (and probably shouldn't be): The World Ends With You - example; it's a Title Drop near the end All You Zombies - not example; it's a Title Drop at the very end Frisky Dingo - example; it's a password to control the Big Bad's doomsday device Devil May Cry - not example; The protagonist is a devil attempting to defeat another devil... which may apparently make him cry? Crest Of The Stars - not example; presumably refers to the heraldry of the empire of Space Elves. AFineAndPrivatePlace - not example (mostly because it's fairly obscure); not mentioned in the work, as best I can remember, and makes sense only if you know the rest of the line, which is from a 17th century poem: "The grave's a fine and private place, / But none, I think, do there embrace." The story takes place in a graveyard and involves ghosts falling in love.

Now you try it: think of a few random titles and see how many of them have "obvious" connections to the work's content.

Word Salad doesn't mean "has no obvious connection to the work" It means "words strung together in a way that results in nonsense, whether it's grammatically correct or not."

Trying to draw a line between an obvious connection to the book and a 'not-obivious' connection shoves the page right over the line well into subjective territory. It's begging for natter problems and edit wars over whether the connection is obvious or not.

Here's a couple more that you said have no connection, but there is one: Chariots Of Fire was named for a line in William Blake's poem "and did those feet in ancient time", set to music as the hymn "Jerusalem".

Considering that the movie was largely about the impact of their respective religions on two of the characters' ambitions as runners, and their determination to succeed anyway, it's quite fitting.

The Name Of The Rose was chosen to be deliberately disconnected from the book; to impart no information whatsoever about the book. Eco said "the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left."

edited 20th Jun '11 5:31:11 PM by Madrugada

While "word salad" only mean the second one, "Word Salad Title" is for both. In this regard, it was probably a slightly poor name choice, but it serves its purpose well enough.

If we really wanted to, you could maybe split it along the lines of true "Super Punk Octo Pudding Gas Mark Seven" titles and "Literary Allusion Titles" for things like Chariots Of Fire or His Dark Materials, but that's about it.

EDIT: And what you're proposing, even if it weren't 100% covered by Super Punk Octo Pudding Gas Mark Seven, would have a lot of duplication of examples with it. Reservoir Dogs, for one. The name doesn't have anything to do with it*

edited 20th Jun '11 8:59:06 PM by Wulf

Onl if you are arguing from the dictionary definition of the words in the title. But not according to how the page itself is used. It's a misnomer, if you want to get technical, but it doesn't bother anyone as it is, most single word exaples are already listed.

Compare to how Fun with Acronyms also contains initialisms, but still it would be pointless nitpicking to split initialisms from acronyms, or in that case, "random words" from "random mix of words", on such a technicality.

EnragedFilia, yeah, I think it's the definition of Word Salad Title that's mostly an issue here. I'm pretty much ready to launch, but I still need to know if I'm dealing with a separate trope or not.

I disagree. There are certainly many works that fit this trope, which is why I think it deserves a page, but they're far from being the majority.

Well, it's hard to be truly random, but of the last fifty fictional books I've read, the only one that clearly fits is The Chrysalids (better go add that one!). The Pillars Of The Earth might also count; I can't remember if there's a Title Drop or not.

The rest have titles like The Lord Of The Rings (evil dude, name of Sauron), Thank You, Jeeves (Title Drop, as with most of the Jeeves books), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Exactly What It Says on the Tin), or Eragon (Character Title). A few are more obscure than that (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Color Purple), but you still get an explanation if you read the book through.

Madrugada:

Give me a break! Most of the tropes on this site are subjective to some degree or another! Does my trope contain some borderline cases? Sure, but what trope doesn't!? It's certainly not as subjective as Word Salad Title. It's not much more subjective than Non-Appearing Title. It's about as subjective as Non-Indicative Name.

Heck, it's probably one of the less subjective tropes out there!

Thanks for the notes about Chariots Of Fire and The Name Of The Rose. I'll add them to the descriptions.

Wulf:

I realise that that could be a problem. I figure if I launch my trope on a separate page, I can include a note saying that nonsensical titles should get filed under Word Salad Title, rather than my trope.

EDIT: Crowner

edited 23rd Jun '11 4:21:05 AM by BlueIceTea

No, as soon as you make whether a work qualifies hinge on "obviousness", it's no longer objective. To someone who grew up hearing and singing the hymn 'Jerusalem' regularly, the connection of "Chariots of Fire" to the movie may well be obvious; to someone who never heard the hymn in their life, it's completely opaque.

That's the kind of subjectiveness that causes the worst problems — we know this from past experience with the various Did Not Do The Research tropes, back when they tried to sort instances by how "obvious" the mistake would be. We've gone down that path before. It doesn't lead anywhere good.

And to be honest, I don't think Title Drops are so universally expected that not doing it needs its own trope.

The only genre where Title Drop is expected is in songs with Lyrics. No where else is it so common that it should be mentioned when it isn't.

As I understand it, what you're trying to do is make a trope for the conceptual space in between Word Salad Title and normal titles. However, I still think that this space is at best too narrow to merit a separate trope, in part because the definition of Word Salad Title is a little broader than you're treating it. There's no need for a title to be silly, weird or nonsensical (Crest Of The Stars and A Fine and Private Place, for instance, are fairly normal phrases in and of themselves).

In sort, the distinction between "titles that's explained in the work" and "title that's related to work via some other source" is simply too fine a point upon which to base two tropes.

Now it's true that the current description doesn't really mention any of this, but according to this discussion and the usage of the trope that I've seen elsewhere, it's the description that could use improvement.

Okay, I'll make it really simple. Pick a work on my list. Then explain where in the work the title appears. It doesn't have to be Title Drop, but the content of the title must show up somewhere.

"Look, people fighting wars! Among the stars!"

Something like that.

As I've already mentioned, things like background literary knowledge don't count. Yes, some people grew up singing "Jerusalem". But lots of people didn't. The only thing you have to go on is the work itself.

Where in the work does the title come from?

If you can't answer that, then it qualifies for this trope. What's so subjective about that?

edited 25th Jun '11 5:15:33 PM by BlueIceTea

And my question is what makes "The title isn't clearly and directly referenced in the work" tropeable?

Really? ok.

Eureka 7: One of the protagonists is named Eureka, and (according to the example already there) Eureka Seven was also the name of the space mission that started the whole backstory.

Angela's Ashes: It's a memoir, and the author's mother is named Angela.

Bleach: Admittedly less clear than the previous two, but as has been mentioned, the protagonist Ichigo has orange hair, which is presumably bleached (although not confirmed as such). I have heard other theories as well, but nothing particularly compelling.

The Two Towers: As posted above, there are at least three towers, any two of which could be taken as the subject of the title. No, it doesn't matter which ones Tolkien had in mind. Personally, I always assumed it was Sauron's and Sarumon's, because their Enemy Civil War if fairly central to the plot of that book.

In my opinion, all of the examples given in the OP could be arguably be added to the Word Salad Title page (several are already there, including Bleach, Eureka Seven, Reservoir Dogs and Straw Dogs)

edited 26th Jun '11 12:54:12 AM by EnragedFilia