Discussion Main / NotUsingTheZWord

There's also the fact that none of the pop culture zombies resemble the actual haitian zombies at all, so not calling them "zombies" makes perfect sense because they simply aren't zombies.

The beginning of the description makes it clear this isn't about zombies specifically. Thus, I removed the following - it's good writing (or at least the second paragraph has a good point), but it's off topic and misleading for the trope:

"One of the more Genre Savvy reasons is that the walking dead technically aren't zombies. The proper "zombie" is a person whose higher thought processes have been removed, leaving them under the sway of a master. This original zombie is usually the result of occult vodou magic. Some books, such as The Serpent and the Rainbow, argue that vodou practitioners can create zombies through a combination of drugs and cultural beliefs. "P-zombies", or "philosophical zombies", are even more convoluted — persons who don't have any subjective "experience".

Because of the older meaning of "zombie", it would make sense not to call them that in works that take place before the Romero Living Dead films established them as monsters (and even Romero himself didn't originally call them zombies), but sometimes works in the past will call them that anyway."

Okay, I'm also going to remove the next paragraph, because it both is zombie-specific and sounds far-fetched:

"Can also be a form of enforced Genre Blindness where it's implied that the reason no one uses the term is because in-universe the very concept of the living dead in general has never entered a single person's mind in the history of man."

MAYBE this one could be re-written to work, I don't know. It would help if I knew of actual examples.

Should we really have straight aversion? Calling a zombie a zombie in a zombie movie does not seems like a trope.

Removed this because it's simply not true:

The proper term for an animated corpse is "ghoul", or if under the sway of a master, "revenant".

I'm not sure where the person who wrote that got those definitions. A ghoul is someone or something that eats corpses, robs graves, or enjoys morbid things. A revenant is someone who has returned from death or a long abscence. Look it up in a dictionary if you don't believe me. (Seriously, look it up before changing it back. They're real words with real definitions.)