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{{trope}}
[[File:CultofthePancakeBunny 7030.jpg|frame|[[Memetic Mutation|A smeerp wearing the ceremonial ''jackflappen''.]]]]
The planet of the [[Rubber Forehead Aliens]] is just like Earth (or at least just like the [[Planet of Hats]])...but we're [[Recycled in Space|in space]], so regular old Earth flora and fauna just won't do.
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{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* In ''[[Gundam]]'''s
* ''[[Highschool of the Dead]]'' [[Not Using the Z Word|refuses]] to call the zombies "zombies". Instead they use "Them", and even went out of its way to imply they're two different things.
* Dandelions in ''[[Popotan]]'' are called "popotan" after the Japanese word for the flower (''tanpopo''), and the same terminology is used in the dubbed version of the series. Exactly why they are called this is never explained, although there obviously is some sort of difference compared to normal dandelions.
== Comic Books ==
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* Parodied by ''[[The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy]]'', which declared that every civilization in the galaxy has some kind of drink—its exact composition varies (often drastically) from race to race and biochemistry to biochemistry—whose name is pronounced something eerily like "gin and tonics".
** "Ouisghian Zodahs" are mentioned in the same paragraph. A page or two later, when Arthur and Ford get their jynnan tonnyx, Arthur finds that his tastes a lot like a whiskey and soda.
** Of course, that whole passage is a reference to something that has long fascinated anthropologists and structural linguists: just about every culture on earth that independently discovered how to ferment and distill drinkable ethyl alcohol on a widespread basis went on to name the resulting spirit "water of life" - whiskey, aquavit, vodka, ouzo, et cetera (look them up!). The most widely accepted theory is that historically, alcoholic beverages were known to be much safer to drink than water: drinks made via distillation process are rendered sterile,
* David Weber's ''[[Honor Harrington]]'' series inverts this trope; in a galaxy filled with post-Terran humans, almost every creature ends up [[Call a Smeerp a Rabbit|named after vaguely similar Terran animals]], leading to such creatures as Treecats, the Kodiak Maximus, and the Sphinxian Chipmunk, which is often noted to bear no discernible resemblance to the chipmunk at all. However, they invariably [[Hold Your Hippogriffs|alter folk-sayings to include the "IN SPACE" names]], even when the real Terran animal should remain familiar or generic (such as 'cats, short for Treecats, instead of just cats).
** He uses this trope so much that it can be jarring when he ''doesn't'' have characters refer to something being "a paper <ref>tiger</ref>" or suchlike. Given that Earth still exists in the setting and is a superpower to the superpowers, one wonders why these people haven't seem to heard of plain old "tigers", despite Honor referring to someone as an "old dinosaur". The impression left is that sometimes Weber simply runs out of space-animals to substitute with, and grudgingly uses the original expressions. Also, several Earth animals are mentioned as having been exported off Earth, which makes the substitutions slightly more bizarre. It's hard to believe people would replace "cat" with "treecat" when there are still perfectly good cats around.
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* The ''Dragon's Gold'' series by [[Piers Anthony]] creates new animal names by making a [[Portmanteau]] out of the names of two similar animals that exist in the real world. For instance, when the book mentions an "allidile," this of course means a creature that is similar to both an alligator and a crocodile. Or, to stick with the rabbit example, the books would probably refer to a rabbit-like creature with a word like "harebit."
* In the foreword of ''[[Nightfall]]'', the authors explain that, in order to avert this trope, they are replacing alien measurements and terminology with Earthling equivalents (a move which itself may fall under [[Literary Agent Hypothesis]]).
* In ''[[The Underland Chronicles]]'', the assorted oversized creatures of the overworld are given simpler names, allegedly by the people who live there. (Rats are known as "gnawers", spiders as "spinners", and so on.) This is what the creatures of the Underworld actually call themselves, just translated into the nearest thing in English. Humans have one of these names too among the Underworld creatures,<ref>[[Humans Are
* In the "[[Guardians of Ga'Hoole]]" series, there are a large quantity of words made up in order to make the owls feel more like a unique culture.
* With the exception of ''Dragonsdawn'', all of the novels in the ''[[Dragonriders of Pern]]'' series have replaced "horses", "cows", "dolphins" and "dogs" with "runnerbeast", "herdbeast", "shipfish" and "canines", to name a few examples. They add a bit of spice of the series, and they are at least easy to figure out what the alien word is referring to.
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* Neal Stephenson's ''[[Anathem]]'' both uses and inverts this trope. Devices that are obviously cell phones and video cameras respectively are called "jeejahs" and "speelycaptors", but vegetables and animals of the alien planet on which the novel is set are [[Call a Smeerp a Rabbit|named for their closest Earth equivalent]] and Earth Anglo units (feet, miles) are used.
** Inversions include names like 'fraa', which is reference to what monks calling each other brother say in Latin, but distorted to remind you that's where the name 'Friar' comes from too. In this case it's like calling a rabbit a Lapidine sclerodont, or a spade a schopfel.
* In the ''[[The
** Hamilton's later Void Trilogy describes the (telepathically) genetically engineered animals inside the Void by analogy to Earth animals, quite probably given the origin of human life in the Void the Earth animals from which they evolved.
* In ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'', [[J. R. R. Tolkien|JRR Tolkien]] refers to tobacco as "pipe-weed." This may have been to avoid the dissonance of placing New World flora in an Anglo-European [[Fantasy Counterpart Culture]]. Though then again, they did have ''potatoes''...
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*** The lizards also use their own terms for certain ranks and vehicles, most of these being [[We Will Use Wiki Words in the Future|wiki-words]]: "fleetlord" means admiral, "shiplord" means captain, "killercraft" means jet fighter, "landcruiser" means tank, "troopcarrier" means APC. Interestingly, certain words they use make no sense given what we are told about them. They call their spacecraft "ships", even though they're from a [[Single Biome Planet|desert world]] with no large bodies of water and have never bothered to develop naval vessels. The word "landcruiser" implies other kinds of cruisers, except they have none. A Chinese woman is baffled by the Race's use of "ships", as their "planes-that-never-come-down" are most definitely not on water.
*** Also interesting are the lizards who learn a human language and will still insist on calling a tank a landcruiser, meaning they learn "land" and "cruiser" and jam them together instead of the equivalent term.
* Although it's not exactly a completely different world, in ''[[Harry Potter and
** Snape also has problems with the term "mind reading", and instead prefers legilimency (which is dog-latin [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|for "mind reading"]]).
** Similarly, instantaneous travel is called apparation instead of the Muggle sci-fi word "teleportation", and animated corpses are inferi, not "zombies".
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* In the ''[[Tairen Soul]]'' series, several things and animals, [[Humans by Any Other Name|including humans]], are often called by other names. A ''rultshart'', for example, is roughly equivalent to a wild boar.
* Several of Jo Clayton's works use this—for example, ''chinin'', first mentioned in ''Moongather'', are clearly dogs (and explicitly identified as such in ''Changer's Moon''). However, there are also plenty of [[Horse of a Different Color|beasts of different colors]], and even the occasional [[Call a Smeerp a Rabbit|smeerp identified as a rabbit]].
* Mostly avoided in ''[[Redwall]]'' except for "hotroot pepper", which the evidence suggests is probably horseradish.
* [[Eric Van Lustbader]] has the Pearl Saga where everything, even the race that seems to just be humans, has a different name. In fact, the only thing with a recognizable name seem to be dragons, which are just dragons.
* Largely averted in Gurney's [[Dinotopia]] books; flora and fauna are meticulously called by their scientific names, no matter how long those might be; it's mentioned that learning these is an essential part of a child's education. And no matter that the setting takes place before most dinosaurs were given these names. However, the trope ''is'' used with skybaxes, [[Giant Flyer]] pterosaurs who have appeared in every one to date. ''Journey To Chandra'' mentions in passing that they're Quetzalcoatlus, but people usually just call them skybaxes. They, and no others, are called by a common name. It's made odder because a larger Quetzalcoatlus subspecies showed up in a previous book and was mentioned to be ''Q. northropi''.
* In Jacqueline Susann’s ''[[Valley of the Dolls]]'', the titular “dolls” refers to a fictional slang term for the pills Neely O’Hara becomes addicted to.
* In Clem Martini's
* Sheri S. Tepper's ''World of the True Game'' has a whole fauna of clearly recognisable beasts such as bunwits (rabbits), fustigars (dogs,) zellers (goats), flitchhawks (raptors) and pombis (bears) ''even though'' they are clearly said to have a completely different evolutionary background, with a pentagonal body framework rather than a spine. Weakly justified as the results of genetic meddling by the original settlers, but still...
* David Eddings avoids this for the most part, which makes it difficult to say whether or not he actually is doing it. In the ''[[Belgariad]]'' series they encounter "rock wolves," which might be hyenas, or might simply be hyena-like monsters (vaguely wolfish, humped backs, hooting laugh). Since Garion does not know what a hyena is, he cannot contrast any differences the rock wolves might have.
* In an odd variant, humans from the [[Funny Animal]]-populated world of ''[[Spellsinger]]'' are so accustomed to living amongst hundreds of other intelligent mammals that they (like everyone else) refer to what grows on top of their own heads as "fur", not "hair".
* Stewart Cowley's TTA Handbooks refer to Earth as Terra and its inhabitants as Terrans, despite being set in what at the time of publication (1970s) was the near future (21st Century).
* The [[Lensmen]] refer to Earth almost uniformly as Tellus and its inhabitants as Tellurians. There are occasional slips.
* In ''[[The Firebringer Trilogy]]'', {{spoiler|horses}} are called ''daya''.
* In the ''[[Vorkosigan Saga]]'' the idiom for "Agent", "Representative, or "plenipotentitary" is "voice". For instance, when Miles oversaw a criminal investigation for his father, in ''Mountains of Mourning'' he concluded by saying "I am the Voice of Count Vorkosigan." And when he conducted a diplomatic mission for the Emperor in ''Diplomatic Immunity'' he did so as The Emperor's Voice." This is a believable idiom for a legal concept any complex civilization would need.
* Referenced, inverted, then subverted in ''Expendable'' by [[James Alan Gardner]]. An explorer on an uncharted Earthlike planet glimpses a small brown animal jumping into the underbrush and immediately thinks "rabbit", even though she knows it probably isn't an actual rabbit. {{spoiler|It is.}}
* Dragaerans from
* In [[Mercedes Lackey]] and James Mallory's ''[[The Enduring Flame Trilogy]]'', there are shotors, which from the description sounds like they are camels.
* "Daggits" from
▲== Live Action TV ==
▲* "Daggits" from the original ''[[Battlestar Galactica Classic|Battlestar Galactica]]'' were dogs. Amusingly, many people only think of Muffet, the robotic replacement for a daggit, when they hear the word "daggit", but it applied first to normal dogs.
** They also had their own words for time units ([[Unit Confusion|micron]], centon, yahren).
** They also once referred to "a crawlon in its web", in a context where we would refer to a spider.
* ''[[Babylon 5]]'' parodied this trope with G'Kar's discovery that Swedish meatballs from Earth were exactly like a Narn delicacy called ''breen'', and furthermore that ''every'' other known race in the galaxy has a dish ''exactly'' like it. It's one of those mysteries whose answer would drive you mad were you to learn it.
** The [[Sufficiently Advanced Aliens|Vorlon]] equivalent is, in itself, a sentient species.
* ''[[Farscape]]'': cycles are Earth years, solar days are Earth days, arns are hours, and microts are seconds. It is never mentioned why alien species on the other side of the galaxy would base their time units around the relationship between Earth and its sun, especially before they ever learn about Earth.
** Lampshaded a few times by John, when he says things like, "It'll take a few hours...I mean arns."
** The alien units are explicitly not exactly the same as their Earthican equivalents, but they're conveniently similar.
** It might not have been so much Earth and the sun as it was some other world and the sun. Science does tend to provide very specific requirements for life to exist on a particular world, so theoretically it's not impossible that these units of measurement originated from a planet in a relatively similar position to its own sun as Earth is to its own. Also from a practicality standpoint, especially once various species started getting together and space travel became a regular part of this civilization, it makes sense to find a very specific means of measuring time since you can't use the position of the sun like you would on Earth, so an approximation of the average time a planet takes to complete a circle around its sun seems like a reasonable way of measuring a year.
**
* Particularly in the ''[[Star Trek]]'' franchise, alien plants, animals and foodstuffs tend to have names following the pattern , such as "Romulan ale", "Aldebaran whiskey", "Altarian chowder", "Delovian souffle", etc. Klingon stuff gets more detail, because they have their own language, but they still have blood pie. Diseases get the same treatment; for instance, "Rigelian fever". Alternatively words can be rendered Startrekky by the addition of a prefix: not mere [[wikipedia:Polycythemia|polycythemia]], but ''xeno''polycythemia; not common-or-garden [[wikipedia:Triticale|triticale]], but [[Star Trek/Recap/S2/E15 The Trouble With Tribbles|''quadro''triticale]].
** With quadrotriticale at least, it was [[Mr. Exposition|explicitly noted]] that the stuff was developed up from the original grain:
{{quote|
** A particularly horrible visual example occurs in "The Enemy Within" where a putative alien creature is played by someone's poor dog in a costume made of orange acrylic fake fur and horns.
** One of the strangest is the "Bolian" Double Effect Principle that they developed in "their [[The Middle Ages|Middle Ages]]" which is identical to the Double Effect Principle as developed by St Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic Church during 'our'' Middle Ages.
** Similar to the ''[[Penny Arcade]]'' example with ''[[Star Wars]]'' above, ''[[Sci Fi Debris]]'' took exception to ''Star Trek'' "updating" metaphors like describing someone as a 'third nacelle' rather than a third wheel, pointing out that ''we'' haven't updated metaphors about horses and carriages to make them about cars, for example.
*** Indeed, ''[[Star Wars]]'' has a least a little more justification than ''[[Star Trek]]'' in using this trope when it comes to metaphors. At least ''Star Wars'' is meant to be in its own 'verse, with no canon ties to Earth. Whereas ''Star Trek'' is meant to be our own Earth (pretty much, anyway), just centuries into the future.
* "Debbie" the Bloop in ''[[Lost in Space]]'' looks indistinguishable from a chimpanzee. The movie adaptation improved on this by making her a far more alien goggly-eyed chameleon/lemur creature with the help of [[Conspicuous CGI]].
* In the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' episode "The Five Doctors
** [[Lampshade Hanging]] in the novel ''The Gallifrey Chronicles'', where Rachel asks Marnel why the readouts on his Time Lord technology are in Greek, and he retorts that they're not, they're the letters of the Gallifreyan "omegabet". (Note that "omegabet" is also calling a rabbit a smeerp; there's nothing that makes it different from an alphabet except that that's not what they call it. But it's also a joke in that "alpha" is the first letter of the Greek alphabet -- "beta" is the second, hence "alpha-beta" -- but "omega" is the ''last'' letter.)
* In ''[[Stargate SG-1]]'', the planets they visit are occasionally victim to this. The most common one is the Stargate itself, which is called everything from "The Great Circle" to a "chappa'ai", but they also use this trope on other words, including swear words every now and then.
{{quote|'''Bounty Hunter''': The System Lords think that you are a pain in the mit'ka.
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* In an episode of ''[[Captain Kangaroo]]'', the Captain dreams that he is visited by aliens who need "a glunk full of gleeger" to fuel their spaceship. He tells them he has no idea where to get such a thing, but while they're there he offers them a glass of milk, and wouldn't you know it...
* [[Dungeons
▲== Tabletop RPG ==
▲* [[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]] is much more eager to spawn a bizarre monster, but occasionally does this for a change.
** In 4th Edition, there are monsters called the Macetail Behemoth and the Bloodspike Behemoth, which have an uncanny resemblance to an ankylosaur and a stegosaurus respectively. The 4E names may be inspired by [[Eberron]], where halflings name all dinosaurs this way. The dragons also have their own names for the dinosaurs, so every species has three different names. There's a chart in one of the books to help keep things straight.
** [[Forgotten Realms]] has [http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Rothé rothé], which is sort of musk oxen. However, they also got [[Underground Monkey|variants]] with innate magic - small "deep" and big (and silenced) "ghost" rothé. They're originally from the 2E ''Fiend Folio''. Dinosaurs on Chult are known as "thunderers" or sometimes "behemoths".
*** Malatra has a lot, including renamed [[Player Character]] races: "katanga" (hengeyokai), "Lacerials" (Saurials), "Oscray" ([[Spelljammer|Scro]]). More so for "garudas" (dinosaurs) — then again, the "common" names are not in a living language to begin with: horned garuda (triceratops), spiketail (iguanodon or stegosaurus), leaper (deinonychus), horn garuda/onehorn (monoclonius), bigbeak (pteranodon), garuda dog (euparkeria, flesh lizard (allosaurus), sailback (dimetrodon), gnasher (teratosaurus/t.rex), spine gnasher (spinosaurus), water gnasher (suchiminius tereminus), three horn (triceratops), horn lizard (ceratosaurus), duck bill (lambeosaurus), rock skin (anklyosaurus), garuda chicken (compsognathus), flesh ripper/tyrant lizard (t.rex), the great black gnasher (black dragon).. and the tontor (elephant).
* White Wolf games in general do this a lot, especially
* ''[[Warhammer
** Not to mention Jokaero - the space orangutans, or gyrinxes - the space cats. The world of W40k hasn't always been the grim place it is nowadays.
== Theater ==
* Played for laughs in AA.Milne's play ''The Ugly Duckling''. The princess' suitor is required to answer a riddle to win her hand. The king gives him the answer in advance, but the riddle is changed at the last minute and the none-too-bright suitor answers "A dog" instead of "A cat". His servant (the princess' real suitor in disguise) quickly explains that in their country, "dog" is another word for "cat". Spoofing this trope even further, he adds that there are places where the creature is known as a "hippopotamus".
** A. A. Milne loves this trope. It's prevalent in ''[[Winnie-the-Pooh|Winnie the Pooh]]'' but distinction between real animals and stuffed ones is kind of lost in the Disney adaptations.
== Theme Parks ==
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** Actually, most companies do this nowadays. Every store I've ever worked for called employees "Team Members" and customers "Guests."
** Not just the employees and the customers: Guest areas or any occasion where cast members are within guest view are called "on stage" whereas employee only areas are called "backstage", and uniforms are called costumes.
== Toys ==
* The Rahi in ''[[Bionicle]]'' all have [[Foreign Sounding Gibberish]] names despite most of them just being enlarged, cyborg versions of Earth creatures.
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[Ryzom]]'' lives and breathes this trope. The pigs are yubos, the toucans are ybers, the dingos are gingos, the crabs are cloppas, the ''other'' crabs are kitins, there are four different kinds of giant mosquito...and there's [[Up to Eleven|many, many more]].
* The ''[[Baten Kaitos]]'' games do this to a degree; we have such things as "fluffpups" (poodles) and "bunnycats" (long-eared cats), as well as "pollywhales" (tiny legged orcas). And then there are the weird ones, like "pows" - pigs that, umm, give large quantities milk, and are white colored with black splotches...
** ''[[Baten Kaitos]]'' is less Call a Rabbit a Smeerp, more of [[Mix-and-Match Critters]]. Pows for example are Pig/Cow, Bunnycats are Bunny/Cat, and pollywale seems to be Tadpole/Orca. Other hybrids include Dog/Deer and Sheep/Goat.
* The Interactive Fiction game ''The Gostak'', by Carl Muckenhoupt, is based entirely on this trope: you are thrust into a world where not only nouns but even the entire vocabulary of common verbs is replaced with a fantasy dialect. The grammar is still recognizably English, but the main puzzle of the game is working out the game's alien vocabulary.
{{quote|''"Finally, here you are. At the delcot of tondam, where doshes deave. But the doshery lutt is crenned with glauds. Glauds! How rorm it would be to pell back to the bewl and distunk them, distunk the whole delcot, let the drokes uncren them. But you are the gostak. The gostak distims the doshes. And no glaud will vorl them from you."''}}
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** This even extends to some of the playable sentient races. Those humanoid bull/cow people that are part of the Horde are not minotaurs, they're Tauren. The new sixth race for the Alliance in ''Cataclysm'' are not werewolves, they're Worgen.
* ''[[Fable (video game series)|Fable]]'' doesn't have werewolves, it has balverines! Who (in the first game) can only be hurt by silver, disguise themselves in human form, howl at the moon, and, oh, can infect other humans who survive being bit.
* Day 9 TV gets a kick out of ''[[
* ''[[Super Mario Bros.]]'': They're Koopa Troopas. Not turtles.
** Admittedly, Turtles aren't talking, bipedal entities with ''removable shells.'' However, in some games "Koopa leaves" are referred to as "Turtley leaves," which just ''demands'' the question--''who thought changing the name would be a good idea?''
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* ''[[The Tower of Druaga]]'' and its [[The Tower of Druaga (anime)|anime spinoff]] both do this with classical dungeon-crawling enemies. Minotaurs are "Kusarakks" and Dragons are "Quokks", for example.
* In the universe of ''[[The Elder Scrolls]]'', those aquatic mammals with tusks and whiskers aren't walruses - they're "Horkers". It is borderline in that horkers aren't exactly walruses, just very similar (they have three tusks, although it's easy to miss, and in ''Bloodmoon'' they had arrow-shaped snouts), but gets highlighted by the fact that almost all the other ''almost''-like-Earth animals get to keep their Earth-analogue's name (the four-tusked fur-covered Elephantidae are mammoths, for example).
** ''[[The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind|Morrowind]]'' includes an in-universe example - Bonewalker is stated to be the Dunmer term for the category of undead generally called 'zombies' in the west (where your character came from).
** In ''Oblivion'', one of the plants you can pick to use for alchemy is called "St. Jahn's Wort", presumably because Tamriel has no St. John to name St. John's Wort after.
* ''[[Star Fox Adventures]]'' uses dinosaur terminologies similar to [[The Land Before Time]], including "Earthwalkers" for Triceratops, "Snowhorns" for Wooly Mammoths, and "Red Eyes" for Tyrannosaurus.
== Webcomics ==
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* ''[[Erfworld]]'' parodies this with its "dwagons," "gwiffons," "spidews," and other such beasts. Main character Parson Gotti, from Earth, explains to his boss Stanley that he's used to "dragons" and "griffons" on Earth. Stanley replies that they sound stupid, especially "Earth."
** Gwiffons are also [[Call a Smeerp a Rabbit]], since they look less like griffons and more like marshmallow peeps. See, Stanley wanted a warlord [[Exact Words|who ate gwiffons for breakfast...]]
* ''[[Sorcery 101]]'' decided to call Chinese Sipanese even though before now one thought this was our world with werewolves and vampires and mages and demons.
** Pretty much every region in that comic has a different rename. UPH for USA, Terra for England, and so on.
* Averted and Lampshaded in ''[[El Goonish Shive]]''; The author decided to concede and call his not-exactly-a-vampire thing a "vampire" because he knew the readers would accuse him of trying to pawn a vampire off as something else. A character in the story was telling her friends about a monster conceded to her listener's suggestion that it is a vampire because no what she says that is what they are going to hear.
* ''[[Homestuck]]'' parodies this trope with the trolls, who use an exaggerated form of U- and non-U-English. Where a low-class troll like Sollux would say "ablution trap", a higher-blooded troll like Equius would say "bathtub".
** Additionally, Alternian versions of Earth animals are named after a word relating to the animal with the suffix "-beast." For example, horses are "hoofbeasts", and cats are "purrbeasts." Also, professions are given combat-related names, even if they have nothing to do with combat (so lawyers are "legislacerators".) Justified in this case, as [[Proud Warrior Race|literally every troll is in the military or will be in the future.]]
** Also, some celebrities on earth have troll counterparts, who are literally called "Troll (name)".
== Web Original ==
* The ''[[Chaos Timeline]]'' often does this. America is called Atlantis, teddy bears are ''mishkas'' since they were invented in Russia, computer hackers are ''Logos'' (from 'logic'), [[Angst]] is called ''horreur'', a blitzkrieg is a ''molniya'' (Russian for 'lightning'), tanks are ''Walzen'' ('steamrollers' in German), capitalism is ''monetarism'' etc. Justified, since history diverged in 1200 and people could well invent different names for things.
== Western Animation ==
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* ''[[The Land Before Time]]'' series has used this trope to death, but in the past, with dinosaurs. On the one hand, if you saw stegosauruses every day, you'd want to come up with a word for them that's easier on the tongue than the polysyllabic ones that scientists come up with. On the other, the reasoning could have had more to do with the [[Viewers are Morons]] mindset...because, of course, kids ''always'' have a hard time remembering words like "tyrannosaurus" and "stegosaurus". Therefore, everything has incredibly simplistic names, such as "spike tail" for stegosaurus. They even have a word for the sun, "great circle".
** To be fair, this is least annoying in the first film, where it was agreed that having the dinosaurs call themselves in names that were given to them ''millions of years after the fact'' by some talking primates would make little sense.
** Of course, anyone that thinks the target audience would be unable to cope has
** One exception is 'sharp tooth' which eventually is generically applied to any carnivorous animal, though from a herbivore's point of the view this is probably sufficient.
** Occasionally the animals will refer to things by the 'correct' names.
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* ''[[The Simpsons (animation)|The Simpsons]]'': "Behold, the two headed dog, born with only one head! And behold, out of the mists of time, the legendary Esquilax, [[Mix-and-Match Critters|a horse with the head of a rabbit, and the body...of a rabbit!]]"
** The thought of which raises many philosophical questions...
* ''[[Avatar: The Last Airbender]]'': Although not considered "A different planet", this series has tons of different animal hybrids (duck turtles, platypus bear, badger mole, etc.), along with plants and food (sea prunes, ocean kumquats). The [[Fridge Logic]] of naming animals after other ones that don't exist in their world is lampshaded when the group went to Ba Sing Sae and received an invitation from the Earth King to celebrate the birthday of his pet "
{{quote|'''Toph:''' This place is weird.}}
** There's also the Herbalist's pet which appears to just be a regular cat, though no one notices.
* [[Sequel Series]] ''[[The Legend of Korra]]'' has "Satomobiles," automobiles with sedan-chair flair, named after their in-universe creator, [[No Celebrities Were Harmed|Henry Ford-like]] industrialist Hiroshi Sato.
* ''[[The Snorks]]'' is a great example of this. They have Shellovisions, not Televisions. [[Flintstone Theming|Things are changed to be underwater related]].
* [[Downplayed Trope]] In the ''[[Thundercats 2011]]'' episode "Song of the Petalars" when Wilykat teases his sister Wilykit for kissing an 8-legged amphibian he calls a "froog" on a dare from him.
== Real Life ==
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* [http://notalwaysright.com/ix-nay-on-the-eesh-squeesh Eesh Squeesh]. Apparently they mean Onions.
* Rocky Mountain oysters. Sounds more appetizing than "testicles".
* Anglish is a [[Con Lang]] based on the concept of replacing English's non-Germanic words with Germanic replacements and retaining the grammar. Nouns are frequently ''very'' different, even when the rest of the sentence is largely unchanged.
{{reflist}}
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[[Category:Language Tropes]]
[[Category:Speculative Fiction Tropes]]
[[Category:
[[Category:Name's Not the Same]]
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