Newer Than They Think: Difference between revisions
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It may also tie into [[Our Monsters Are Different]], as many "standard rules" seem like they should come from folklore and legends, but really come from more recent media. The development of [[Tabletop Games|fantasy RPGs]] has been a major mover in both tropes, as RPG creators have freely raided, adapted and bastardized from folklore and literature in order to fill their manuals, scenario books and bestiaries.
Some [[
Compare [[Lost in Imitation]] (well-known elements of a story are a lot more recent than the story itself), [[The Newest Ones in the Book]]. Convincingly well-done [[Retraux]] is a common factor in this trope.
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* That rabbit that is found everywhere in Europe and a pest in Australia was originally an endemism of the Iberian Peninsula. The Romans, who introduced it in other places for hunting purposes, didn't even have a specific word for "rabbit", using terms like "Small Hare" or "Digging Hare" instead. The first domestic rabbits appeared only in the Middle Ages.
* Rats were not always living in nearly every part of the world, and were not always [[You Dirty Rat|looked down upon]]. The most familiar species, the [[Non-Indicative Name|Norway rat]], [[Misplaced Wildlife|came from northern China]] into Europe near the end of the Black death. It was the Indochinese black rat that came first, in the 1st century.
== Dress and Costume ==
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** The strict regulations on headgear and facial hair in the US military that essentially barred Sikhs from service were only imposed in the 1980s. Before that, many Sikh males volunteered for or were drafted into the military.
*** The regulations were not, however, intended to exclude Sikhs or other ethnic/religious groups from military service. It turns out, in a world where biological or chemical warfare attacks are a possibility, that facial hair makes it very difficult to obtain an efficient seal on gas masks.
* The tradition of the "white" wedding dress originated in 1840, when [[
** In Sweden the traditional color for a wedding dress was black. That didn't change until the 1920s.
** White was the primary color of wedding gowns in the early 1800s, although probably owing to the fact that evening gowns of that era were also primarily white. Silver was sometimes used, especially after the wedding of Princess Caroline of Wales in 1816.
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* The word "[[The Fundamentalist|fundamentalism]]," as a byword for religious fanaticism, dates only to 1920. You wouldn't know this from how frequently it's applied to people living before this era.
* The stories of a beautiful woman luring boatmen to their doom at Lorelai on the Rhine river, while widely accepted to be ancient folklore, was actually first created by German author Clemens Brentano in 1801.
* Although the Golem has been an element of Jewish folklore for multiple centuries, one of the most famous elements of the story, that of the Golem rescuing Jews from a blood libel in 16th century Prague, was [https://web.archive.org/web/20130621192043/http://www.traditiononline.org/news/originals/Volume%2036/No.%201/The%20Adventure%20of%20the.pdf more or less created] in a 1909 novel by a Rabbi Yudl Rosenberg. Rosenberg basically did a [[Literary Agent Hypothesis]] in which he claimed he was editing a much older work found in a (nonexistent) library and skillfully mixed in actual sources/traditions with elements of his own invention. While the novel is little known today, it was really influential and pretty much all subsequent tellings of the Golem legend contain facets original to Rosenberg.
** The Golem being Newer Than They Think ties into the same being true of Frankenstein (see above). There is a popular assertion that Shelly was influenced by the Golem story. However, while both do fit a theme of "alchemists creating an [[Artificial Human]]", the more direct/actual connection between the stories is that [[The Golem|a film of the Golem story]] was made shortly before Whale' Frankenstein movies and was a direct stylistic influence.
* The idea of a [[Princess Classic|saintly and innocent princess]] in fairy tales was largely the result of 19th century writers trying to make everything nice for the children. Older fairy tales would have their heroines be at least a bit more active.
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== Proverbs and Superstitions ==
* "The greatest thing since sliced bread" implies that sliced bread is an old, old concept. Pre-sliced loaves have been around only since 1928: [https://web.archive.org/web/20111120034733/http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/07/slicing-bread-by-machinery/ See the astounding announcement] from ''Modern Mechanics''!
** [[The Simpsons (animation)|Abe Simpson]] recalls, in his childhood, his father talking about America as if it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, adding that "Sliced bread had been invented the previous winter." Given that article's publishing date and Abe's record in [[World War Two]], the comment was probably much more accurate than the [[Gag Series|writers intended]].
** The phrase itself came about as soon as the 1930s; when it was originally used, it meant the "greatest new thing in a series of wondrous new technological developments". It would be like saying how something is the "greatest thing since the iPod" or "greatest thing since HDTV" today. The fact that the phrase stuck around longer than its cultural context is just one of those happenstances of history.
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== Technology ==
* [[Clean Pretty Reliable|CPR]] and mouth-to-mouth have only been around in any recognizable form since the late 1940s, and didn't become standard medical techniques for another decade. (Witness an episode of ''[[Quantum Leap]]'' where a crowd stands dumbfounded as Sam performs mouth-to-mouth on a nearly drowned boy, circa 1954. In ''[[Back to The Future]] Part II'', Marty tells a crowd in 1955 that he knows CPR and gets the reply "What's CPR?". An episode of ''Eureka'' has Alison perform CPR in 1945 on a wounded soldier while everyone around her assumes she is kissing him.) Contrast the actually made-in-[[The Sixties]] [[Star Trek: The Original Series]]' [[Mighty Whitey]] [https://web.archive.org/web/20100722013249/http://www.televisionwithoutpity.com/show/enterprise/star_trek_the_original_series_8.php?page=4 episode], which features whatever-they-did-before-CPR.
** Similarly, the Heimlich maneuver was first described circa 1974. It was likewise used anachronistically by Sam in an episode of ''[[Quantum Leap]]'', on [[Historical In-Joke|Dr. Heimlich himself]].
* The first practical chastity belt wasn't invented until the late 1500s. And they were [http://www.occasionalhell.com/infdevice/detail.php?recordID=Chastity%20Belt never very common] even then.
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* "Flying saucer" wasn't coined as a term until 1947, when an Air Force pilot named Kenneth Arnold spotted a formation of UFO's and coined the term in an interview. Interestingly, the term was used to describe the objects' ''movement'' - "[like a] saucer skipping over water" - rather than shape (he described the shape as crescent-like). That's right, the image of the circular flying saucer is really a result of [[Memetic Mutation]].
** Ironically, "UFO" has come to mean "flying saucer", but in its original USAF coinage [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|means precisely what it says]]—an airborne phenomenon, apparently a material object and hence apparently flying, which for the moment at least cannot be identified. Thus the report of a UFO by one of the Apollo 8 astronauts wasn't nearly as exciting or significant as commonly supposed.
*** Exploited by [[Bastard Operator From Hell]] — one of numerous strange clauses in his (and PFY) contract is "[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/14/bofh_2006_episode_23/ extortionate penalty payment for remaining at work after a UFO sighting in the vicinity of the building]".
* The words "schadenfreude" and "[[Angst]]" have only become part of the English lexicon around 1895, before then they were purely German words writers sometimes borrowed.
* The affirmative "OK" dates to the early 19th century, and [[wikipedia:Okay|is of uncertain etymology.]]
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and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.}}
:Then comes the line that this saying is from an Assyrian tablet dated 2,800 BC. Guess what? [[wikipedia:Assyria|Assyria hadn't even existed at that time!]] The earliest mention of this saying is from '''1924''' book by an American priest ([http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?view{{=}}image;size{{=}}100;id{{=}}mdp.39015001674079;page{{=}}root;seq{{=}}94;num{{=}}76 proof link]). And most probably he just made the whole thing up.
** Well, some sources claim the source an Egyptian writing. The [https://web.archive.org/web/20131030032045/http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/texts/ipuwer.htm source], however, while speaking of corruption, doesn't quite match.
* The word "halitosis" was in fact made up by the manufacturers of Listerine mouthwash in 1921 so that they could have a disease responsible for bad breath which their disinfectant formula could be marketed as the disinfectant ''for''.
** Not only the word, but practically the very ''concept''. While people obviously always understood the idea of funny-smelling breath, it wasn't seen as a big deal until Listerine came along and invented an all-new social paranoia. A similar example of evil genius was pulled off by the deodorant industry, who basically invented BO. It's hard to decide whether the people responsible should have been exiled or given medals.
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* The practice of referring to the lost skyscrapers of the World Trade Center as the "North Tower" and "South Tower" only became commonplace in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. While they stood, the Twin Towers were generally known as Tower 1 and Tower 2.
* Here's a Newer-Than-They-Think [[Catch Phrase]]. A common [[Memetic Mutation]] regarding [[Statler and Waldorf]] is their trademark laugh, rendered as "dohohohohohoh". If you watch footage of Statler and Waldorf under their original performers, the laugh was a very different "heheheheheh". The laugh we're familiar with first surfaced in ''[[The Muppet Christmas Carol]]'' in 1992, after Jim Henson and Richard Hunt had died.
== Games ==
* [[Mahjong]] (a.k.a. Mah-Jong, Mahjongg etc.) is commonly supposed to be centuries if not millennia old, and even to have been invented by <s>[[Confucius]]</s> Kongzi, but no evidence of it predating the 1880s can be found. The solitaire game [[Shanghai (video game)|Shanghai]] (often [[Non-Indicative Name|miscalled]] "Mahjong" (eg. "Mahjong Titans" in [[Microsoft Windows]] Vista and later) because it's played with the same tiles), which likewise has spurious antiquity claimed for it, was invented by Activision in the
* While earlier variants appeared in France as early as the late 19th century, the first example of the game now known as Sudoku was [[wikipedia:Sudoku#History|invented in Indiana in 1979]].
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* The "tradition" of the diamond engagement ring is sometimes thought to have been the result of a 1940s de Beers ad campaign, but this is not the case. The tradition actually began decades earlier, in the immediate post-World War I era; an expensive ring was intended as insurance that the man actually meant to marry the woman, and wasn't proposing just to get sex ([[Serious Business]] at a time when single women had literally no access to birth control and unmarried mothers were thought of as worse than street whores). De Beers merely piggybacked onto a trend that was almost universal by the time their first ads ran. They did however create the idea that an engagement ring should cost two months' salary.
** As well, most of the ideas surrounding the ring were at the very least played up and at the worst invented whole-cloth by De Beers' advertisers over the succeeding decades. See the idea that the size of the rock matters, the idea that selling or trading in an old engagement ring is bad luck, etc. Most [[Egregious]] is De Beers completely making up the "rule of thumb" that a ring should cost the man two months' salary (in an effort to make it impossible to have one standard-sized ring that was "good enough").
*** Not to mention the idea that you should be buried with your diamond jewelry, in order to destroy the second hand diamond market and prop up the artificial scarcity. [
*** Before that time a common engagement gift—not necessarily a ring—was acrostic jewellery: where the initials of the set gems spelled out words or names. REGARDS rings (Ruby, Emerald, Garnet, Amethyst, Ruby, Diamond, Sapphire) are acrostic jewellery, for example, although many rarer and unusual stones are required to fill other letters. Actual ''wedding'' bands, however, have reportedly been around since the Medieval period.
*** De Beers' real achievement was "a diamond is forever". This advertising campaign effectively destroyed (OK, vastly reduced) the supply of second-hand diamonds, which helped them keep their prices high.
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* The name "Oscar," although dating back to an ancient Irish name meaning "friend of deer", was almost unknown until <s> [[Napoleon Bonaparte]]'s grandson</s> Charles XIV's son became King Oscar I of Sweden in 1844.
** There also was an Old English Oscar, usually interpreted as equivalent to the German name Ansgar - both meaning "god-spear" - and part of a whole group of Germanic names beginning "Os-", notably Osmond, Oswald, and Oswin. Saint Ansgar or Oscar (801-865), first archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, was known as the "apostle of the North". The name Oscar was popularized in the late 18th century by James MacPherson's literary forgery ''Ossian'', which was where Frenche General Bernadotte, later King Charles XIV of Sweden, got the idea to name his son Oscar.
* The popularized act of kissing the ring of a Mafia Don does not seem to have any basis in reality prior to 1972 movie [[The Godfather]]. It is said that it was barely practiced in real life even after that, except amongst posers. Kissing a bishop's ring or the Pope's Fisherman's Ring
* In the musical ''[[The Music Man]]'', Harold Hill refers to "Captain Billy's Whiz Bang", which was a joke magazine that didn't exist until World War I. However, the show is set in 1912.
* Many younger ''[[Doctor Who]]'' fans are surprised to discover that the ''Doctor Who'' [[Christmas Episode]] is only a 21st-century revival phenomenon. (There was one before in 1965, but at that time British TV didn't usually do "event" television at Christmas and broadcast whatever shows were normally scheduled with a Christmassy twist.)
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