Tiffany woes

[telophase]

Most of you have probably heard of the Tiffany Problem, where you can’t use a well-researched thing from history because modern perception of it has changed and it feels like anachronism.

I’ve run into that because I would really like to call my big civic population centers “communes,” the actual name for them, but get stuck with “city-state “ because a commune is something different today. I could use the original Italian spelling, but unfortunately “comune” just looks like I misspelled “commune.”

And I’m currently reading a book on Spanish infantry of the early modern age. There’s a whole chapter on mutiny, but at the time it was more like a labor stoppage or strike, not the point of no return as we see it today, which is going to require careful explaining if I decide to put it in the next book. Sigh.

Comments

[marycatelli]

And you can't broadcast a rumor, even if you can reach into a sack of seeds and cast them broadly over the garden. . . .

[telophase]

I had an instructor in museum school strike me for the use of "wagon train" with (imagine Edna Mode) "No trains!" in exhibit text for a (fake) Renaissance-era exhibit.

Nowadays I'd probably throw the OED's 1810 citation of "wagon-train" at him, but I doubt it'd do any good. :P

[camwyn]

There's always italics? I mean, if you talk about the comune of Randomplace, it doesn't look quite as misspelled- and if the in-universe language allows it you can always use the Italian plural, too, which indicates very strongly that you're being deliberate about both the spelling and the italics. The comuni of Randomplace and Alsorandom, say.

[telophase]

Hrm. Something rubs me the wrong way about that, and it might be that I'm not italicizing any other unfamiliar words (except for magic spell titles, I think).