Call a Rabbit a Smeerp: Difference between revisions

* [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Earth#Animal_species Wookieepedia] has an exhaustive list of this trope as it applies to ''[[Star Wars]]''. Dice, for example, are called "chance cubes". ...Although actual dice with pips instead of colors have appeared and gone by "dice" in the EU.

** ''[[Penny Arcade]]'' complained that ''[[Star Wars]]'' [[Expanded Universe]] writers take this kind of thing to ridiculous extremes:

** [[Star Wars Expanded Universe]] is a grab bag of names - looking at alcoholic drinks alone, there's lomin-ale, Corellian Whiskey (with brands like Whyren's Reserve), lum, juri juice, [[Death Star|A Walk In The Phelopean Forest]] (even the bartender doesn't know what's with the name), Savareen Brandy, and a [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Alcoholic_beverages lot more.]

** There are occasional subversions; a duck is still a duck, for example.

** A.C. Crispin's ''Han Solo Trilogy'' regular mentions mouse/rat-like creatures called "vrelts." The smeepriness is extended to common phrases featuring rats, "a deadly game of cat and vrelt."

** [[Alan Dean Foster]] (ghost writing for [[George Lucas]]), in the [[Novelization]] of ''[[A New Hope]]'', [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] this during an early conversation between Obi-Wan and Luke, who grew up on a [[Single Biome Planet|very dry planet]]:

'''Obi-Wan:''' Never mind. }}

* The kind of science fantasy that gets lumped under the "[[Steampunk]]" label likes to smeerp technology:

* 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 ''quadro''triticale.

** With quadrotriticale at least, it was [[Mr. Exposition|explicitly noted]] that the stuff was developed up from the original grain:

KIRK: Mr. Spock, you've made your point. }}

** 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.

** [[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.)

* 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.

'''Teal'c''': No. }}

** Although when it comes to the Stargate, this trope is completely justified. "Chapp'ai", like "Stargate", is simply a translation of the Ancient name for "Stargate". And many cultures that have no idea that the Stargate was anything but where the "gods" came from, or, in many cases, just a strange struture with no apparent purpose, would come up with their own name for it, having never translated the word "Stargate".

** [[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.

** Said game is clearly a deliberate 'spin-off' from the 1930 science-fiction story ''The Gostak and the Doshes'', by Dr. Miles Breuer, in which the sentence "The gostak distims the doshes." plays a major role. This sentence is not Dr. Breuer's invention; the credit goes to a writer named Andrew Ingraham, who coined it in 1903. The sentence became much more widely known as a result of its appearance in the 1923 book ''The Meaning of Meaning'', by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards.

* Although not set in outer space, ''[[The Legend of Zelda]]'' series consistently refers to common clucking barnyard fowl as "Cuccos". One character even refers to a cowardly character as a "Cucco". It's less out-there than most examples, since it's based on the Japanese equivalent of "cock-a-doodle-doo" (''kokke'''kokko'''h!'' --> ''kokko'').