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| Apologies to Ms. Darwish for irrelevantly using her excellent album to refer to a literary concept |
My daughter first alerted me to the Tiffany Problem (TP), but I didn't encounter it in my own writing until last night, when a writer's group workshopped a chapter from Biscuit for me.
TP refers to a situation in which the modern audience perceives a name, word, or concept as too modern, so that its use in the text seems historically inaccurate, even if it is not actually anachronistic. In other words, it's something that is incorrectly assumed to be a goof (to use IMDb terminology).
The origin of the phrase arises from the idea that Tiffany was a hugely popular name in the 1980s, and so people assume it is modern, when the name is actually quite old (it's a nickname for Theophania, which dates to medieval times). The first recorded example of Tiffany as a girl's name spelled with a -y dates to the 1600s.
Here are the two examples from my writing, and they are from a scene taking place in 1939:
- She was planning to quit her job when the baby came, and then they’d have no financial cushion at all.
- As he always did when making a big decision, he did a cost-benefit analysis. He quickly drew a two-column table on his scratch pad and filled it out.
In the interests of fairness to my readers, I didn't know the history of either phrase before last night. When they brought it up, I suspected cost-benefit analysis (CBA) was historically accurate, but that's all it was, a suspicion. And I never even thought about "financial cushion." I used both phrases because I didn't think to separate my vocabulary from that of my characters.
Financial cushion really is a problem - while the term "cushion" has been used figuratively to mean "protective buffer" for a long time (back to the 1800s, possibly earlier), the word "cushion" used in conjunction with "financial" first started appearing in print in the 1940s and 1950s. It began appearing in official documents in the mid-1960s but didn't come into common use until the latter part of the 20th century. While it's not impossible in 1939 (word usage always starts before the historical record, which is just when it was first written down), it's definitely improbable. I'll probably just remove the word "financial" (or look for similar period-accurate phrases).
CBA, on the other hand, is definitely a Tiffany. The concept was first played with by French engineers in the 1700s. A French civil engineer named Jules Dupuit (the guy who helped build the Paris sewer system) pioneered the modern approach in 1844 (though he called it "the measurement of the utility of public works"), and an English economist standardized and formalized it by the late 1800s. The phrase was in common use in English by the 1930s (the practice and term were regularly used in President Roosevelt's WPA projects), and CBAs became part of American federal policy by 1939.
Interestingly, despite its origin as a French concept, the modern French version of the phrase, analyse coûts-bénéfices, or sometimes analyse coûts-avantages, didn't go into common usage until the 1950s. So the concept had been well-established for nearly 100 years by the time my story takes place. The cognate was in common use in English but less commonly in French. And given its origin as a French engineering term, I suspect that its use by a French-speaking engineer in 1939 is downright likely.
The thing is, even though the use of CBA isn't really a goof, it might still be a problem if it yanks readers out of the world of the story.
It raises the question of what my role as a storyteller is. On one hand, it's not my fault when readers lack an encyclopedic etymological understanding of every possible phrase I might use. On the other hand, a good writer immerses her readers in the world of the story, and it would be foolish not to minimize stimuli that yank readers out of that world.
This is where decision-making gets hard. My grandpa was an engineer, and I want his story to seem like it's from an engineer's point of view. Using engineering terms that are also in common use just makes sense to me. But at what cost? (Ha! See what I did there?)
