Just For Fun / TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary

"A Ghost Head is a type of Cybernetic Allen Key which a Fake Thomas Jefferson uses to Impeach the Goddamn President. Used mostly when a writer is Combing His Hair or Speaking Fluent Cat, although if a character is Shirtless And Hungry it can be used to give them a Fire Island Swirlie. See also The Alien Is Not An Alien and Germany Fits In My Pocket."

— Something Awful forums, on TVTropes's effects on language^note Please note that most of these are not actually tropes. They could be, though, one day... they definitely could be... Maybe they're from an Alternate Universe version of TV Tropes?

Or enrich it, depending on your point of view.

It seems to be not at all unusual for a troper to begin speaking Tropinese in Real Life situations that do not involve discussion of entertainment. This is apparently another way that TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life. It gets worse for tropers whose native language isn't English. They unawarely insert tropes into their conversations and the receiving side usually not only simply have no idea what that phrase means, but can't understand what you just said AT ALL. And you can't just send them a link to explain - they don't understand English, remember? ^note  Unless the article in question has been translated into their native language.

The most evident symptom of this is the word "trope" itself, which is not commonly used outside of this site — it's only the 67,470th most frequent English word. That's behind "privies" but ahead of "milliners", just for reference. Then again, many foreign languages do not even have a translation for the word 'tropes'.

At this rate, we're going to end up fitting in on the Tamarian homeworld.^note Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra.

You may even realize^note on the way to the fridge that you have already started doing this without realizing.

This, when combined with a tendency to apply Square Peg, Round Trope, is why some artists aware of us aren't exactly fond of the site. On the other hand, many artists are Tropers themselves, and a number of our linguistic travesties are borrowed from industry jargon.

Compare Newspeak. See also Speaks in Shout-Outs.

---