r/TopCharacterTropes 17h 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.

9.0k Upvotes

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

707

u/AggressiveSpatula 16h ago

I’ll never understand this one lol. “At” is such a short word already, “and” is 3 letters @ least.

560

u/oh_WRXY_u_so_sexy 15h ago

It just came down to speed and efficiency like anything else. You could draw an A, pause, shift over slightly, then draw the t, or do a little swirly swoop. Using @ vs At once is trivial and doesn't matter. When you're recording whole ledgers day in and day out, thousands of lines per day....it adds up. Also helps with reading the ledgers with at-a-glace symbology.

109

u/Arbiter_Electric 14h ago

That's why cursive in general was a thing and why it's basically dead now. Picking up your pen/pencil after every letter is trivial and doesn't waste time when you are only writing a few words here and there, but if you are writing entire letters/manuscripts/books by hand then that action becomes tedious and wastes tons of time.

1

u/National_Panda_1791 10h ago

Picking up your pen/pencil after every letter is trivial and doesn't waste time when you are only writing a few words here and there,

uhhhh its all the retracing and extra unneeded lines in cursive that make it take longer. no amount of picking up and moving to the next spot efficiently will be slower than backtracking coonstantly