On Sun, 8 Feb 2009 23:25:00 -0000, "Alain Dekker"
<abdekker@NOSPAM.fsmail.net> wrote:
>I'm not sure how to ask this question,
There's a way to not ask it, and that's to post it separately to more
than one newsgroup. You posted it under different subject lines to
ALE and AUE. If you want to post to more than one newsgroup, proper
netiquette says to crosspost. It saves bandwidth as compared to
posting separately.
>but you know how you watch a movie
>about, say, the Ancient Eqyptians and one of the characters is wearing a
>wristwatch. There's a word for that faux pas, which is, I think
>"anachronism".
>
>My question is, say you were watching a movie about polar bears and they
>showed you, or talked about, polar bears vaching and eating Emporer
>penguins.
>
>Now polar bears are strictly North Pole and Emporer penguins are strictly
>South Pole. This cannot happen.
>
>What is the term, if there is one, for this, please?
You've had answers in both newsgroups, 'anatopism' and 'anachorism.'
The former seems preferable to me, since there are other '-top-' words
to keep it company ('topography,' 'toponym,' plus many less familiar
words in which 'top-' means 'place.').
The roots '-top-' and '-chor-' can both mean 'place' in Greek. A
wild-card search on '*chor*' in a shorter Oxford gets lots of hits,
but none of them seem to use '-chor-' for 'place.' I wonder if there
are some that I missed in the long list, or some that the wild-card
search didn't find.
It seems strange to me that 'anatopism' is rare (as stated in a
shorter Oxford). I should think it would find about as much use as
'anachronism.' This makes me wonder if there's a more common term to
refer to something that's geographically misplaced, one that hasn't
surfaced yet in this thread.
Incidentally, it seems worthwhile to mention here 'parachronism,'
anticipating a time when some reader may be curious to know a term
that refers to something from an earlier time that's unlikely still to
occur at the time to which the context refers. It could be thought of
as the opposite of 'anachronism.' Witch trials in 21st-century Salem
would be a parachronism. Television in 17th-century Salem would be an
anachronism.
--
"How dreary, to be...Somebody! How public, like a frog, to
tell one's name, the live-long June, to an admiring bog!"
<Emily Dickinson>
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