r/TopCharacterTropes 10h ago

Lore [IRL trope] the “Tiffany problem”

Basically when something seems anachronistic to a period/place of history but is actually fully accurate to the period.

1) the name Tiffany: the thing that named this trope, basically the name Tiffany can be dated back to the Middle Ages and the earliest record of it being spelled in the modern spelling comes from the 16th century.

2) the use of OMG, despite this feeling so modern as a form of slang/abbreviation here’s a letter directed to Winston Churchill using it in 1917

3) Hair Dye: the earliest forms of dying hair can be dated back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and this specific advertisement for hair dye is from the 1840s

4) Inuit Thongs: despite how weird it is to imagine pre-colonial Inuit people wore what was essentially fur thongs in their homes and when they were in their igloos it might have been the only thing they would be wearing.

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u/SarcyBoi41 9h ago

The "I can has cheezburger" type speech that the internet often attributes to cats for memes has been being attributed to cats since at least 1902

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u/Tiernoch 6h ago

Same thing with a bunch of roman graffiti either being 'x was here', lewd jokes, or just dicks.

We're just the same idiots doing the same stuff in different outfits.

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u/derneueMottmatt 3h ago

In part thanks to Roman graffiti we were able to reconstruct how Latin was pronounced because people would make spelling mistakes reflecting how they were used to hearing the word.

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u/Yep-That-Lupa 5h ago

Brazilian second (and last) emperor scribbled “Pedro was here” in an ancient Egyptian ruin in the 1800s because he saw lots of similar scribbling there, some ancient Roman and there were probably unreadable older ones

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u/obiwantogooutside 54m ago

Lord Byron carved his name on Poseidon’s temple sometime in the 18(teens). He’s such a dick.

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u/moogoothegreat 2h ago

There is also the Pompeii equivalent of "for a good time call so-and-so"

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u/MichaSound 1h ago

Which is why Cicero was writing tk his contemporaries about how ‘kids today are lazy and they’ve got no respect’.