I saw an interesting short video in my YouTube feed a week or so ago about ‘The Tiffany Effect’: facts that historians actually feel that they need to leave out when they are documenting history, because they seem so anachronistic, evn though they’re not at all. The name of the effect comes from the fact that ‘Tiffany’ seems like a modern name for a female, maybe dating from the 1980s, yet it’s really centuries old.
Some of the other examples given in the video were the fact that a coin-operated vending machine, dispensing holy water, existed in ancient Greece; and the Inca had a complex postal system complete with uniformed postal workers.
Then there’s the slang. ‘Legit’ has been in use since the 1800s. Someone used ‘OMG’ as an abbreviation for ‘Oh My God’ in a 1917 letter to Winston Churchill. And I think I observed an example in the wild this past weekend while watching a Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie. Rathbone as Holmes said to Watson, of a character who had done a good thing, “more power to her”. Those movies were made between 1939 and 1946. The expression “more power to (you / him / her)” I would have thought to date back to the 1980s, maybe 70s at the earliest.
When “Saving Private Ryan” came out, there were a lot of comments and even posts in the IMDB “goofs” that the soldiers in the landing craft had their rifles wrapped in clear plastic, which of course didn’t exist in 1944. Even though it absolutely did, and there are numerous examples of pictures from D-Day of rifles wrapped in plastic.
And who could think that Tiffany was a name that started in the 1980s? The jewelry store opened in the 1830s.
Not that people think the name did not exist until recently, just that it’s assumed the name was not given as a first name for girls until recently.
Similar to ‘Madison’. In the movie ‘Splash’ Daryl Hannah’s mermaid character needed a fake name to give Tom Hanks’ character, so she saw a street sign for ‘Madison Avenue’ and said her name was ‘Madison’. At the time it was supposed to be funny, because what young woman would have the name ‘Madison’? But it became a popular girls’ name after the movie came out.
Well, the effect is so named because the name ‘Tiffany’ given to a female is not a recent development; people only tend to think it is. You are an exception, having known a Tiffany
born before the 80s.
That’s a good one; has a pretty modern ring to it.
Yes, gladiators were very much like modern pro athletes. Good article.
I was on a panel that discussed the Tiffany Effect at the last Arisia convention. I’ll have to check my notes at home for the examples we discussed, but one that stands out to me is the name “Tiffany” itself. When I was a kid going to parochial school, we were taught by nuns. One of ours was Sister Theophane. “Theophane” is actually a name from Greek mythology. It means “manifestation of God”, which probably made it OK for Christians to use as a girl’s name. Over time, “Theophane” got slimmed down to “Tiffany”. It was also a last name, whence “Tiffany and co.”
The musical Chicago, set in the 1920s, has a song called “Mr. Cellophane”. When we first heard it, we scoffed a bit (despite it being an awesome song) because surely cellophane wasn’t around in the 1920s! But it was. It was invented in 1908 and became a household product around 1924.
I remember coming across the word “bleach” in a Bible verse and being skeptical (Mark 9:3). Turns out “whitening via the sun” was well known at the time of the Bible, just the use of the word “bleach” was more modern (like, Old English). Also the word is not universally used across translations.
Terry Pratchett claimed that the name “Tiffany” derived from “Land Under Wave”, but I’m not seeing that attested elsewhere. I am, however, seeing that his goal for his character “Tiffany Aching” was a name that looked completely out-of-place for a witch.
I remember reading one of Tolkien’s LOTR drafts in The History of Middle-Earth in which a character says that they should not “blab”. I thought that it was surprising for a scholar like Tolkien to use a bit of modern slang, but when I looked it up I found that it has been used since the early 1500s.
One of the things discussed at the panel was the craze for green sunglasses in the early 19th century. I wrote a piece about it for an optics magazine. You might have suspected this from the Roger Corman Edgar Allen Poe movie The Tomb of Ligeia, in which Vincent Price wears such shades as is set in that time period. Or from Elvira’s Haunted Hills, which does a great job parodying the Corman films, and has Richard O’Brien wearing similar dark glasses, obviously in imitation of Price. Gary Oldman, as Count Dracula, wears a pair in Bram Stoker’s Dracula in what might seem to be an excuse for his walking through London in broad daylight (even though that story is set much later in the 19th century). But it was a real affectation of the period. the Lagoon amusement Park and Pioneer Village (and museum) used to have a pai of Brigham Young’s own green spectacles on display, although when I contacted them they couldn’t seem to find them.