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Main Call A Rabbit A Smeerp Discussion
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
" 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.