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