Real Life section maintenance

The crowner description needs updating, but we decided a while back that before a trope is added it needs to be discussed at least a little before adding it.

Mind you, I don't personally disagree with either item or the reason for including them.

Make the Bear Angry Again shouldn't be both NRLEP and Truth in Television. There's a hefty portion of the description dedicated to(some entries of) its RL examples. I can't investigate much right now but it looks like a lot of that stuff was added by Just Troper in late 2017.

Changing descriptions unilaterally is a don't do that ever, especially when it's changing it to try to fit examples in that didn't fit before. You fix the examples or remove them, not change the description. Otherwise, you get Trope Decay and all the messy stuff. It needs to be reverted.

I’ll open up the floor here for Never Live It Down to remove all real life examples, as started in this thread: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=13327578050A72722200&page=41#1015

Way too controversial in nature, given recent additions having potential for flame bait.

Rice Burner was added arbitrarily.

"Can be too heated to discuss and can attract flamebait".

Typical weasel words - what's relevant is if it is too heated to discuss and if it does attract flamebait.

Does it?

I think there is a legitimate concern for NeverLiveItDown.Real Life. Some people are adding hidden examples (i.e. from the get-go they have the comment-out markup) and others are editing the commented-out examples as though those examples were not commented out. Here's a link to the page history. This seems wholly in the realm of "not kosher." And if people can't follow time requirements for a trope, then there's a problem.

IMO, the item on the crowner should say something like "hot button politics, requirements of the trope being disregarded, tropers circumventing notice by misusing comment-out markup"...

Specific tropers to call out would be ryanasaurus0077, Koopa Kid 17, and Laptop Guy. All three of them added hidden examples within the past year. Special shout out to Sor Pepita who added a hidden example on 20 Jan 2017 whose edit reason was "Restored in invisible form so it can be used 17 years from now."

edited 25th Jan '18 5:08:14 AM by WaterBlap

That honestly sounds more like a matter for mod intervention than a mere maintenance thread.

Edit: In fact, went ahead and hollered.

edited 25th Jan '18 6:04:32 AM by nrjxll

Rynasaurus at least has been around long enough to know better, too. -.-

Rice Burner: Well, the example indentation will need work if kept.

I think the Rat Rod example can go -how can something be a Real Life Introversion of a story element?

The Bosozoku gang example doesn't have enough context.

There's examples referring to other examples...

I'm not seeing the alleged issues, but it sure as hell needs a serious cleanup. I say do that first, then see what we have.

edited 25th Jan '18 9:34:01 AM by Candi

I forgot I called Foreshadowing and Make the Bear Angry Again.

If we're calling Make the Bear Angry Again, then is it okay for the Truth in Television section of the description to be cut and cauterized?

At a 12:1 ratio, I'd say yes.

NeverLiveItDown.Real Life has been brought up in this thread before, which is when the 25-year time limit was added. Then we decided that it wasn't bad enough to cut outright, since most of the problems were about recent politics.

At this point, it's a maintenance issue. Is it misused enough that it's not worth keeping?

If people are circumventing the decision by hiding examples in order to wait 25 years (or 17 years or however many years it takes) then I would say it is not a problem worth keeping. The fact that the maintenance slipped says that nobody cares enough to enforce the 25-years rule which supports the argument to cut the page; that option being the "we give up" solution to something people don't care about in the first place.

I think The Unpronounceable should be NRLEP or In-Universe Examples Only, or at least have its RL section significantly trimmed. From the talk page:

"Most of the real life examples, other than intentionally unpronounceable things such as Prince's alternate name or that guy with a paragraph block name, should be cut. The trope isn't The Unpronounceable By English Speakers. It's about words that are completely unpronounceable by humans. Some of them, like the Indian name one, are completely ethnocentric. And half of them are perfectly pronounceable by an Anglophone. They're just spelled unintuitively. Like La-a as La-dash-ah. Any English speaker can say that. They just need to know how."

I agree that most of The Unpronounceable Real Life examples seem to be misuse. By my reading of the trope, is seems to be for names that are either portrayed literally unpronounceable by at least one of the speaking species in the work (definitely fit) or possibly names that are portrayed as practically impossible/extremely difficult for major characters in the work to pronounce due to language differences, and it's tropeable because their unpronounceable nature plays a role in the story in some way (could be a plot point; could just be scene-setting for illustrating alienness or communication difficulties).

By those criteria, Prince's symbol name would count (literally unpronounceable, and deliberately chosen to be outside the realm of normal names). The concept of shibboleths probably counts—they are designed/intended to be practically unpronounceable by speakers of certain languages, whether successful or not, and specifically "targeted" at possible outsiders to identify friend from foe (about as close to narrative purpose as exists in real life).

However, in the absence of a narrative, a name from one language/culture which is perfectly pronounceable to those of that language/culture shouldn't qualify just because it happens to be difficult to pronounce for people of other native languages/cultures. The concept of dolphins/other animals having spoken names seems closer to the trope than differences among human languages, since this is a human wiki and the names are probably unpronounceable to humans, but still doesn't really fit, since the dolphins presumably chose those names according to their own communication methods without any intention of using them in communication with other species.

I suspect the number of legitimate Real Life examples is probably quite low, and it seems like the type of trope that attracts people shoehorning in whatever "weird" name the trope makes them think of, so I'd support making it NRLEP. The shibboleth concept might be worth mentioning in the description itself rather than as an example, since it does seem to fundamentally rest on the principal of certain names/phrases being unpronounceable to certain groups.

While I don't think Rice Burner should be NRLEP, its current real-life section could definitely use some cleanup.

edited 28th Jan '18 11:35:05 PM by Xtifr

I think there's a difference between something that can't be pronounced, and something that doesn't have a pronunciation. Defining a name through symbols without pronunciation falls under the latter, and that's not what the trope is about.

That said, I think it's possible for the trope to exist, but I don't think most examples are examples. I think at this point just cutting the bulk of them would suffice. I would however keep the JMS example, since they refer to the trope.

Cutting all examples would also save me from trying to properly explain how to pronounce "Dag Hammarskjöld", since the actual explanation there is crap. Anyone trying to explain Swedish pronunciation in English invites errors.

To be fair, that's true for almost any pair of languages - or even for dialects within the same language. It's very hard to explain in one written language how a word in a different language is pronounced. And even using the phonetic alphabet it's hard, because the different languages have different phonetics.

Take "Hammarskjöld" as an example: the "skj" combination in Swedish is much simpler to pronounce than it looks, because it denotes a sound similar to the English "sh" sound - but it's not quite the same sound; it's in fact a sound that doesn't exist in most English dialects, so it's hard for a native English speaker to get right. But it's far from unpronouncable, it just takes practice.

"Different languages have different phonetics"? Use IPA, that's why it exists.

Should we add The Unpronouceable to the crowner?

edited 29th Jan '18 4:52:10 AM by Lymantria

I think we should hold off putting it on the crowner until we sort out what would and what could be an example.

At the very least any example from a natural language cannot count since obviously it is possible for humans to pronounce those words. Any invented language then that uses phonemes humans can make shouldn't count either, generally speaking.

Though the trope does explain that it isn't pronounceable in English. Is there a point to that or should its focus be more general?

edited 29th Jan '18 5:18:07 AM by WaterBlap

Lymantria, I was going to mention the IPA. Using it avoid the awklwardness of explaining one language's phonetics using another language's orthographics, but it doesn't make it any easier to pronounce sounds which are not in your native language. But I decided it was beside the point, which is that much of the "unpronouncable" nonsense stems from misunderstood orthographics and not from actual pronunciation.

edited 29th Jan '18 9:42:43 AM by GnomeTitan

Does TV Tropes support IPA?

I was talking generally.

I think of "unprounceable" as being something humans can't produce without help, due to differing vocal equipment from the space bugs or whatever, and/or something like Mxyzptlk, where it's confusing on purpose. (I always think of that as "mixel-pixel" for some reason.) Currently, either represents a narrative intent rather then real life.

Deliberately using a symbol with no corresponding vocal sounds -when it's not an alien thing- doesn't seem to be in the same spirit.