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Reminds me of Where's My Water? where the items that Swampy found are called differently and described in odd ways.
This is very close to Third Person Subjective/Limited Point of View
We can never truly eradicate the coronavirus, but we can suppress its threat like influenza
The characters/narrator being unaware of stuff the audience knows would fall under Dramatic Irony.
I didn't write any of that.
It seems to be slightly different: it's not just the audience guessing what's going to happen next so much as forced POV terminology, as in "the person wouldn't be able to conceive of how we think of something". It's to pull the reader/viewer in. I think it ought to have its own trope.
Example: a fanfic of Rivers of London, a 'verse where one of the main characters is a wizard who currently doesn't and. In the fic, he's been sent back in his memories to the Second World War: the other main character hands him a mobile phone. Right, he thinks, it's an enchanted glass with a picture on it.
Example: the entire novel Ridley Walker, set in a post-nuclear-apocalyptic England. There are all sorts of bits of culture like stories about saints and "the little man the Addom" (Adam, and splitting the atom" and Punch and Judy shows...which are deeply thematic but it's all to do with theme and character, where I tend to associate Dramatic Irony as such with knowledge of the plot rather than this sort of intense use of POV to draw the reader in.
Example: Doranna Durgin's novel Dun Lady's Jess, where the main character starts off as a horse magically sent to our non-magical universe and transformed into a human. She starts off as an intelligent horse and then quite intelligent human, but she has to pick up how humans "work". Including why saying that she belongs to her owner freaks people out.
All of those wouldn't really work as dramatic irony in the sense of stage or screen, but they're very immersive in prose fiction because prose fiction (usually) uses POV.
^ That's why I suggest "Third Person Limited Point of View"
We can never truly eradicate the coronavirus, but we can suppress its threat like influenza
Sort of Like Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp" except they really are the exact same thing, and there's a very good reason for being described differently.
...Actually looking at that page, it looks like it needs some work.
Edited by Zhvair
Also limited/subjective perspective under Third-Person Narration on Point of View. And Future Imperfect, for this specific case.
Edited by Unsung
Suppose there's a novel that ends with the twist that the cavemen are actually people from Post-Apocalyptic earth. Through the novel, the narrator mentions the cavemen finding strange objects they've never seen before, shiny and angular, which they assumed to be magic. It's obvious to the reader who knows the twist that these are old high-tech devices, but the story doesn't say it because the characters don't know it.
Is there a trope for the euphemisms used to describe a technology that readers know about, but characters (including First-Person Narrators) don't?
Edited by Mac_R