Distinction between "Unusual Euphemism" and "Hold your Hippogriffs"

Good observation. HYH is the injection of an idiom of our world into the world of the character. If we don't know that Hippogriffs are a common phenomeom in a certain fictional word, we may have to assume the character was just making the phrase up on he fly instead of it coming from within their environment. UE are usually made up expressions unrelated to the world of the characters.

Perhaps that's where we can draw the line. If we have the impression that "Go to Tartarus" is a perfectly common saying in the world of the character then it's HYH (even if it was used for censoring), if the phrase seems unusual for the character to say, it's UE.

Or like in this example from Futurama where the characters are fish and Fish!Fry curses "Son of a fish". That's Hold Your Hippogriffs as it relates to the world of the character is embedded in.

Edited by eroock on Jan 19th 2019 at 1:33:48 PM

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I can grok that.

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Looks nice.

~randomtroper89, ~Another Duck, ~KJ Mackley, ~eroock, and ~War Jay 77; would you all agree with the above distinction?

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I am fine with the distinction and would like to see it reflected on the trope pages. Plus example cleanup if need be.

I think it's fine.

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I don't think it's the entirety of it, but it works to differ them if you don't know the difference between a euphemism and an idiom, I suppose.

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It's good enough as a succinct distinction between the tropes, but just not comprehensive. The main issue is that calling it unusual In-Universe implies that others can't understand it. Slightly better would be:

• Unusual Euphemism is a term created by a character that's not a Real World phrase, but generally understood anyway (exceptions would be if a character lampshades the absurdity of the phrase).
• Hold Your Hippogriffs is a term common in the relative setting that's inspired by a Real World phrase, and understood the same as the original.

Edited by KJMackley on Jan 24th 2019 at 2:12:13 AM

So HYH is "Usual Euphemism, but Modified"?

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I think Hold Your Hippogriffs can be described as "Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp", but with expressions".

Yeah, that's kind of it.

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My apologies, that was not my intent.

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So would Curse of The Ancients still be a Sub-Trope to Unusual Euphemism because it is something unusual but generally understood anyway? Would Future Slang be a Sub-Trope to Hold Your Hippogriffs because it is supposed to create a futuristic setting?

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Too many of these tropes can be described that way for that to be distinctive for me.

Edited by crazysamaritan on Jan 26th 2019 at 11:59:23 AM

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"So would Curse of the Ancients still be a Sub-Trope to Unusual Euphemism because it is something unusual but generally understood anyway? Would Future Slang be a Sub-Trope to Hold Your Hippogriffs because it is supposed to create a futuristic setting?"

COTA is "unusual" (given the work's time frame), so it's a subtrope of UE. For Future Slang, yeah.

"Too many of these tropes can be described that way for that to be distinctive for me."

Out of curiosity, I'd like to know them.

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Future Slang is not a subtrope of Hold Your Hippogriffs. Future Slang doesn't have the restrictions of being a remade modern expression. It can be an entirely new and setting-appropriate expression.

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I would agree with ^ that Future Slang can go beyond HYH in its reforming of a language and hence is not a subtrope.

This again? If you're replacing one word or phrase in place of another, that's supposed to be a euphemism. Horses getting replaced by Hippogriffs, both phrases meaning "control your emotional expression".

"Merlin's saggy left—" and "Merlin's Pants" aren't replacing real world idioms with a new euphemism. But they do relate to the world of the characters, and they aren't considered unusual by other characters within the work.

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Don't use what people have written as shorthand explanations for a trope as the actual and full definition. That leads to even more misunderstanding than you've already shown about these tropes.

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I came here for the actual and full definition. So far you've been exactly as unhelpful as the examples list because half of what you say is contradicted by the description given on Hold Your Hippogriffs.

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You've gotten the actual and full definition in this thread. At this point, if you don't understand it, that's on you.

I've not contradicted the definition of the trope in this thread to my knowledge.

As a rule you should not use examples in the trope list to define a trope. If examples are more "correct" than the description, then that's a TRS issue. Sometimes you can use the examples as a guide for interpreting the definition, but this is a case where the definition is rather simple.

Edited by AnotherDuck on Jan 31st 2019 at 6:19:36 PM

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is contradicted by

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is contradicted by

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Again, is contradicted by

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You've spent more posts telling me I'm not drawing the correct conclusions than trying to explain the core concept and it is sparking sulfur in my spine.

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"The liaison's investigation team got past security like X-Wings go through a Death Star" is "a saying or phrase with some words replaced by In-Universe words." The saying is "like a hot knife through butter". The In-Universe words are all of the references to the work, which is most of it.

An object as an insult is not a phrase or saying. Something not being just that does not preclude it from being used to disguise swears.

Again, the saying is "like a hot knife through butter". It's not entirely new. This is a common idiom in the real world.

In short, no, you're entirely wrong. Those are not contradictions.

That's because you've spent pretty much the entire thread being wrong. And you're still wrong, since most of my posts contain explanations.

Hold Your Hippogriffs is about changing a real world idiom or expression by replacing some words with In-Universe concepts. If you can't show what the original idiom is, you don't have an example. If you just make something up, like an insult that's setting-appropriate, then you don't have an example. There's probably a lot of misuse regarding that.

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Thor's left testies! The description doesn't say "hot knife through butter" anymore than it says "go through you like a dose of salts". The "salts" idiom is even more accurate as it implies an explosive action rather than precision action.

Feed the tree! Quit blowing comet gas! Every word in the idiom can be replaced and still be comprehensible if you're on the bounce. That's a core feature of idiomatic language. Tanj! If it wasn't for the other posters in this thread, I'd think train gone sorry! Ga-LAX-y! Every example in Future Slang can be written just like the majority of examples in Hold Your Hippogriffs, yet you claim they don't use idioms. In case you couldn't tell, you're getting my raven wings raised.

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But just using idiomatic language isn't what Hold Your Hippogriffs is about. It's about copying an existing idiom and replacing some words to make it fit. It's not about being comprehensible. It's about being a clear cut-and-paste job, rather than inventing something new.

Edited by AnotherDuck on Feb 1st 2019 at 9:21:59 PM

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Addressing this first because it really irritated me. I created this thread in the first place because I knew I was wrong and I wanted to be less wrong. So I ask, rephrase the answer to demonstrate understanding, and then try to ask a new question based on that understanding. It feels like you've just gone and SMACK! me on the nose with a newspaper saying "Bad dog! Back to the first question!" That's Gaslighting and I resent it.

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The problem is that the "replacing some words to make it fit" clause only works for long idiomatic expressions. Shorter expressions are more ambivalent and you've already expressed belief that the idioms don't need a 1-to-1 correspondence since "hot" was lost when the "knife" was turned into "X-Wing". From the previous page:

• Harry Potter: "Merlin's saggy left—" and "Merlin's Pants" (Should have been in Oh, My Gods!, see later)
• Codex Alara: "crows" and "furies" (again, Oh, My Gods!)
• Discworld: "Librarian poo" (referencing apeshit as the person called the "Librarian" is an ape)
• Warrior Cats: "fox dung" / "fox-dung" (Change fox to bull and dung to shit)

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You could recognize the literal meaning, but because the expressions themselves weren't used in context, there were too many possible meanings to be clear on what each phrase was referencing. But those were the whole phrase. They are expected to be comprehensible to the audience within the context of the work.

Oh, My Gods! is about replacing monotheistic swears with alternatives. The idea or concept being expressed is surprise, frustration, anger... and said idea replaces only a few words. So the idiomatic language can essentially invent an entirely new and setting-appropriate expression because the context allows for audiences to comprehend the change and substitute the original meaning themselves.

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Now, it is possible for you to contend that there's HYH needs to be fairly close to the original phrase. Rather than dispute that, all I really want is other people chiming in to say if that's right/wrong so that discussion can move on from there. Maybe the definition should be changed so that OMG isn't a subtrope, maybe it should be changed into a Sub-Trope of Unusual Euphemism. I didn't expect it to be so difficult to learn what proper context was for a few Isaac Asimov examples.

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