Special:Badtitle/NS90:Forum:Trope Talk/You Can Leave Your Hat On/reply (3)

I'm for keeping the current name. Yes, 1972 song, but 1972 song with about a million covers over the past 40-some years. (I have three different versions in my own music collection, for example -- Randy Newman, Joe Cocker and Tom Jones.) It shows up with reasonable frequency in movies and TV shows as BGM for non-show-business strip teases. (Show business ones get "The Stripper", of course.) And hell, I can remember when Don Imus used to play the Joe Cocker version at least once a day on his radio show, in the early- to mid-1990s.

Yes, it's always a judgment call when a trope name is not immediately obvious. One must always balance out the reality of Small Reference Pools with the possibility that one's own reference pools are not only small, but different from the norm. But this is not an obscure song, no matter how you cut it.

If we dumped a trope name every time someone didn't recognize the source, we'd end up with a whole lot of blandness. I'd rather the occasional reader be confused or intrigued -- and maybe get led to a work they hadn't encountered before -- then squeeze all the fun and humor out. After all, isn't that one of the reasons we split from TVT?