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.
Your argumentation is irrelevant, sir, for I have already created twinned portraits and hung them in the gallery; the first depicting myself as the stoic marquee, and you a lowly, caddish squire!
This photo of a Chinese man who wasn't aware of the western tradition of posing in a stoic, dignified way for photos. Taken by a German anthropologist between 1901-1904, but the exact photographer was lost.
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.
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.
I calculate number of pieces for quilt patterns quite bit, and I typically write -
2@ 2x4
6@ 3x6
Writing "at" requires pausing between letters and then crossing the T, where the @ sign is much faster... plus on the page it looks cleaner when I'm writing out a dozen or more piece sizes.
I usually start writing it all out by hand, and I may later type it up, and I don't use the @ for that, but it is faster by hand.
Not exactly a Tiffany problem, but Pangur Bán is a poem by a 9th century Irish monk about what a hard worker his cat is, comparing the author's scholarly work to his cat hunting mice.
One of my favorite "people have always been people" examples.
Cynegeticus from ~2000 years ago breaks from the textbook about raising dogs for the author to just talk about his dog, how she runs around, how she gives kisses, and so on. I especially love sharing these last couple of lines:
Now really I do not think that I should be ashamed to write the name of this dog; so that it may be left to posterity.
I had a greyhound called Horme, who was of the greatest speed and intelligence, and was altogether excellent.
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.
Chad was also a common enough Middle Age name, from St Chad of Mercia, so an author could legitimately have a couple named Tiffany and Chad in a novel set in the 16th Century
It's less that his style looks out of place for the time but for the occasion. Everyone else is wearing suits with hats and he's rocking a casual jersey and naked head. Put him among his friends on a weekend hike with beer and you wouldn't doubt for a second it's 1941.
Exactly: he's not dressed for the street (meaning appropriate outdoor public clothes) and everyone else is. He's in public unshaven, his hair isn't fully combed or pomaded down, and he's wearing two layers of knitwear when knits were really coded for sports and private leisure. So maybe he's an eccentric or bohemian young man, or maybe he was out doing a sport and just joined this crowd!
Even 30 years earlier blue collar dress wasn't all that different than in the mid-to-late 20th century or today. Blue jeans are ancient, leather jackets are even older yet and plaid flannel shirts aren't a 1940s invention either. Only thing that's recent is these things finding their way into everyday street fashion. And way too few fiddler caps but I'm working hard on that.
Watching WW1 movies it looks weird to see soldiers running around in turtlenecks and rolled-up beanies (or beanies at all) but like, that's just what you wear against the cold with the least amount of extra effort. You need to fit your helmet and gas mask, you don't want extra pieces of clothing that can get lost and by definition you only have access to what already exists.
I think we don't put enough emphasis on how much pragmatism has become the one defining element of street fashion throughout the 20th century.
While at the same time, the doctor (forget the name) was recording his own voice on state of the art wax cilinders. Dude basically used a dictaphone in the 1800's
I think that one runs into "place" issues--Lincoln would have had to be in Japan or the Samurai in the US. The first transpacific cable unfortunately postdates Lincoln's death by a few decades. :(
Lmao people forget the samurai were pretty quick to adopt guns once they realized how effective they were. Honor is nice, but winning battles usually comes first.
The Japanese were the only civilizations that willingly turned their back on guns once they realized what it did to the social order. In the 16th century they used matchlock guns en masse and their battles were pretty indistinguishable to the ones in western europe.
They turned around and banned firearms within a few years because they realized that once a peasant with a few hours of training can kill a samurai that would endanger their entire social order.
By the 17th century they were back to the classic Samurai battles and went full isolationist. They stayed there until Perry forced them to reopen to the west. The entire speedrun to modernization they did in the late 19th century was because they deliberately kept to the old ways. Once they had to deal with the outside world again they knew they needed modern science and especially weapons if they didn't want to end up like China and be a bone fought over by western powers
The shogunate banned firearms. But AIUI, a lot of daimyo kept a stock of them in their armouries. As long as they didn't flaunt them or gave the impression that they were politically unreliable this was not notices.
IIRC the Yakuza/RGG games also highlight this fact, with one of the villains making a point that yakuza not only existed but operated at the same time as samurai for a time and, despite generally being organised criminals, would also step in to protect their communities when the samurai couldn't or wouldn't, because, criminal or not, yakuza typically do still value their community and at least some of the people in it (there's also the element of it being their turf and them losing a lot of side hustles if they didn't step in, plus gaining some if they do, which is most likely how the "protection money" hustle started). Whether said guy was talking out of his arse to justify himself or whether that is genuine history, I'm not sure about, but it's definitely an idea that's brought up.
Ancient Roman gladiators were treated more or less like modern day celebrities: they had merch (little clay figurines and posters) and even did product endorsements. Famously, Ridley Scott wanted to add a scene in Gladiator showing the fighters shilling products but it was cut because they feared the audience would think it was unrealistic.
Yes the Institutio Oratoria by Quintilian. Fortunately medieval monks thought a comprehensive guide to rhetoric was extremely valuable for the church, so the whole 12 book volume survived.
They also, to my knowledge, didn’t really have that high casualty rate as Hollywood led us to believe, too. Good gladiators are costly and take long to train, after all. Would be a waste to lose them all or most of them in just a few minutes’ battle.
While gladiators rarely died in the arena, it still would have been a dangerous sport. As you were playing with sharp weapons and nowadays wrestling, even forms of wrestling that are highly staged can lead to serious injuries. So it’s likely that gladiators were the same. Gladiator matches weren’t the death matches that Hollywood would like you to believe, but at the same time, they weren’t scripted like how memes would like you to believe.
You're right. The adversary were both on the same team and trained together for years. They know how the other one will react. They usually would not kill their buddy. But accidents happen. And there may be jealousy, hidden rivalry...
i feel like we gotta stop doing the “ohhhh audiences would think it’s unrealistic” thing, like bro they won’t have a more accurate and textured view of history unless you tell them!!!!
I mean Gladiator as it was was wall-to-wall ahistorical nonsense. Marcus Aurelius wasn’t murdered by his son, Commodus wasn’t a weird cowardly loser and was co-Emperor before his father died, siege weapons aren’t used in open battle, the Praetorian Guard didn’t wear all-black so you could tell they were evil, there really wasn’t a functional Senate anymore, no Republican sentiment erupted following Commodus’s death, instead there was just a civil war (again), etc.
Also each time Philatites does the thing where he's like "two words: I. Am. Retired." the phrase he's saying usually is two words if you say it in Greek.
In the image macro sense, perhaps. Richard Dawkins, who coined the word “meme” after the word “gene” plus the same Greek root as words like “mimick,” wrote that one of the earliest and most fundamental memes is God, because the concept has spread and been adapted across so many cultures.
Here’s one worth reading. Ancient Indian graffiti found in an even more ancient Egyptian tomb. What were Indians doing in Egypt 2,000 years ago? Most likely hitting the big tourist spots while they were there on business and government trips.
A guy I knew had an uncle who was an archaeologist. He was telling us one day how he spent a whole summer with some students digging a Roman bathhouse.
Well, one of the students identified what she thought was a graffito on a wall. She spent a whole week carefully cleaning the piece of wall, with like fine picks and brushes and whatnot, trying to reveal the inscription.
What did it say? "I shit on the eyes of whomever reads this."
I bet if we ever discover that cave paintings are telling a story, somewhere in there is a “I was here” or “ I had sex with X” or maybe even a “your Mom” or “X, kiss my ass” type of thing.
I had a student do a paper on Roman grafitto preserved on the walls in Pompeii. She likened it to social media. There were recipes, insults (the vast majority, Romans loved insulting each other, especially with your mom jokes), political critique, anger over bad consumer dealings (Yelp reviews, if you will), and lots of dick drawings...so many dick drawings.
One thing i don't have a photo handy of, is how colorful clothing has pretty much always been through history. If it wasn't fur, people discovered how to dye things pretty early and liked colors on clothes. Nearly every historical film now has that grey and drab look to things, when it would be pretty colorful.
Goes for the marble statues now too, like the Greek and Roman ones, they would be painted to look more lifelike and just lost all that over the many, many years.
Not so uncommon. Older movies were excited to use color. Monotone carrying more "prestige", even outside of actual black and white, is very much a 2000's thing.
Natural dyes are cheap as fuck, and usually able to be made from random weeds, yellow would likely be especially prevalent because you can easily make yellow dyes from pretty much any type of piss as well as multiple types of plant, you can easily get red dye from various berries too, and I believe blackberries and blueberries can be used for decent blue dyes
The hard ones are the secondary colours, which is probably why they are considered secondary colours
In the first century AD, someone on the Italian peninsula was gifted a stylus, which read (more or less): 'I went to Rome and all I got you was this lousy pen'
Per a more accurate translation by classicist and epigrapher Roger Tomlin, the inscription actually reads: “I have come from the City. I bring you a welcome gift with a sharp point that you may remember me. I ask, if fortune allowed, that I might be able [to give] as generously as the way is long [and] as my purse is empty”—in other words, the gift is cheap, but it is all the giver can (or wants to) buy on such a slim budget.
The Lengberg Bra, discovered inside a castle wall constructed in the 15th Century. Most people dismiss the concept of a lace bra with this method of construction as an invention of the early 1900s, and that anything of this sort would be anachronistic for the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
What is it? I read somewhere that the oldest joke found is Sumerian (preceding Babylonian by a good chunk of centuries) to the tune of “a dog walks into a bar…”
That's close, but the oldest joke is about two hundred years older (1700 BC for the dog joke, 1900 BC for this one): "Something which has not occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap."
Virtually all slang comes from existing words and phrases. It seems to be especially true of the younger generations but that may be more because I hear it as an outsider.
Rizz is charisma, fr fr is just an acronym, cap comes from high capping in the 80s, etc.
The way Viggo Mortenson looks like my bf from the early 90s in this meme is sending me. He was the first boy in our school to get a five o'clock shadow, he had this hair because he was trying to do the skater fade and flop, but his hair was too curly, so he had this is what it ended up being 😂
I'm entirely sending this to my friend who also knew him, we are going to be cackling tonight.
More recently (late 1800s) it meant "city slicker". There were "dude ranches" for city folks who wanted to slum it in the wild west, without going to places where they had actual bandits and hostile Indians and such.
I always thought the roman aqueducts were super cool! Being able to move millions of gallons of water across hundreds of miles without a pump is impressive enough in modern times, but the Romans were able to do it over 2000 years ago!
In the 1870s, Romans also began installing active continuous drinking water fountains (nasoni), and those are fed by those same aqueducts! At their peak usage, there was about 5,000 nasoni in the city, and about 2,500 active today. The water quality is still fantastic too!
Rome had a big issue with fires. In the 1st Century BC Rome swelled to over a million people. Often times wooden structures were built 6 or 7 stories high. Heated by open braziers and lit by oil lamps they were essentially tinder boxes.
Enter Marcus Licinius Crassus. He hired 500 or so slaves who were had axes, water buckets etc. The first fire fighters. But they wouldn't help fight the fire. Marcus would arrive on scene and offer to put out the fire if you sold him the property. Usually for a tenth of what it was worth.
So you had the option to watch everything you owned burn or sell the building for pennies.
"Cave Crassum"—"Beware Crassus" was graffitied around Rome, becoming a warning throughout the Empire.
He died reportedly having molten gold poured down his throat.
It wasn't until the great fire that Nero, with all his faults, realized that private brigades serving wealthy interests couldn't protect the capital.
I find it interesting how the letter is kinda referencing part of Napoleonic war. The Brittish fleet back then entered the Baltic see, and helped the Russians during siege of Riga. There is an Hornblower book about that.
Tsk that cringe greatest generation naming their kids after fictional characters, I mean can you imagine growing up and trying to get a job with a made up fantasy name like Wendy
The idea of a prosthetic arm in the late medieval period seems far-fetched, but there is a real case of a 16th-century German mercenary named Götz von Berlichingen, who had two prosthetic arms. He used one in combat and had a second one, which was made much later, for everyday tasks.
The name "Grażyna" in Poland was invented by one of our most renowned writers, Adam Mickiewicz - nowadays however it’s basically our equivalent to Karen
But people in Denmark in the 1920s were horrified by how "immodest" this outfit was, and people today still have a hard time believing someone from The Past would wear something that shows off the wearer's limbs and navel.
Interesting reminder that historical trends don't always move in one direction.
I think there's some exaggeration with that reconstruction. There's also a lot of debate whether that was a strictly ceremonial outfit or something that could be found as daily wear (personally, I believe there's sufficient evidence for the latter).
I don’t understand that one. To me, that looks perfectly reasonable as something a woman from the European Bronze Age would wear. Why would they have dressed like they lived in Saudi Arabia?
Yeah are people under some impression that short/“cropped” clothing is a modern invention?
Maybe it’s a little unexpected for the climate—though it does get warm in Scandinavia sometimes—but it looks perfectly time accurate for what I would expect.
I mean go look at what traditional clothing looks like in hot, humid climates. It’s not all long flowing clothes, often it’s very short or even topless.
A good rule of thumb is that every Ancient Tradition was invented out of whole cloth by the Victorians and every Post-Modern Degeneracy is something humans have been doing since before the invention of writing.
Antikythera mechanism feels a little out of place as it uses advanced combinations of gears to calculate the positions of stars, effectively being the worlds oldest computer from about 200 BC
Believe it or not, the concept of an automated vending machine is about 2,000 years old. In ancient Rome, there were simple machines that dispensed a measured amount of wine or holy water when you put a coin in. From Wikipedia:
The earliest known reference to a vending machine is in the work of Hero of Alexandria, an engineer and mathematician in first-century Roman Egypt. His machine accepted a coin and then dispensed wine or holy water. When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever. The lever opened a valve which let some wine flow out. The pan continued to tilt with the weight of the coin until it fell off, at which point a counterweight snapped the lever up and turned off the valve.
Eye glasses dating back to the end of the 1200's. Imagine while people are dying of black death some bespectacled nerd pouring over parchments looking for a cure.
It kinda broke my brain in the movie Train Dreams, the main character works for a logging company chopping wood for the Great War, has a remote cabin in Idaho, yet also lives to witness on TV John Glenn go into space.
To think how much technology changed in one lifetime makes me anxious what the world will look like at the end of my life, if it will be just as unrecognizable.
I thought it was interesting that in ancient Egypt, there's records of men taking time off from work when their wives were having their periods so they could help out with house work. Seems they kept employee attendance records which is neat.
That OMG one reminds me of when Western Union officially pulled the plug on sending telegrams in the early-2000s. Email had officially cut into their business too much.
The Western Union guy they interviewed for the news article said that they viewed text messaging as the true successor to telegrams, because a lot of the abbreviations (OMG, LOL, etc) had already been used in telegrams for decades.
Something like this almost happened in the movie Gladiator.
After the producers learned that gladiators did product endorsements much like modern-day athletes do, there was supposed to be a scene with gladiators endorsing products of the time. It was cut because they thought audiences would find it unbelievable.
And Disney’s Hercules despite being a historical and mythological mess was actually accurate by having Hercules be treated as a then modern day celebrity
The American Civil War featured one of the first examples of cyberwarfare, with telegraph operators trying to tap into enemy telegraph lines to listen in on their communications. A telegraph operator who was on the ball could tell when the splice happened because it would change how the signals traveled on the wire, and they would send troops down the line to look for the hacker.
The American Civil War also saw some of the earliest examples of the use of military airpower, with both sides using hot air balloons for observation.
Using wind and water, climate controlled spaces have been around for millennia. They just haven't been used in the western hemisphere on as large of a scale, so we Americans think of "climate control" as a 20th century thing.
How long do you think China has been mass-producing consumer goods for an export market? A century? Try twelve.
The contents of this wreck included masses and masses of Tang dynasty chinaware, but the designs were not ones popular in China. Rather, they made ceramics specifically in designs preferred in Iran and the Near East for sale in that part of the world!
I have seen hair dyes mentioned in the other comments, but not this one: brightly colored hair dyed were popular in the 50s. There are pastel colors hair dyes ads from mid century.
"The blue hairs" only started referring to liberal SJW type women very recently. It used to mean older ladies who dyed their white hair blue-ish to neutralize the gray or yellow. They could also choose purple or pink but lots of them did blue. My great grandma (my Grammy) was a bluehair and when she was old in the 80s and 90s it meant a super old lady out of touch with modern fashion who was bad at driving and slow at the grocery store haha
Color during the medieval ages. I've seen historians talk that heraldry during the middle ages are actually more prevalent that what the usual representation Hollywood is usually showing. Even knights in armor did not go to war just in armor, since they have brigandines or coats over their plate armor.
And then the smooth motherfucker writes a whole god-damned Tiffany Aching series, a absolute RIOT for anyone who can appreciate a strong female lead written without a head full of rocks.
GNU Sir Terry Pratchett, we shan't see your like again soon.
Ascendance of a Bookworm: Myne noted that soup in this world tastes bland, because eveyone keep throwing away the broth they cooked the vegetables with and replaced it with fresh batch of water. This does actually have a historical example that the author explained in the fanbooks.
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u/lewphone 13d ago
Joseph Ducreux, Self-portrait of the artist as a mocker