Breakfast at Tiffany's?

I saw a post on Threads yesterday from Abraham Piper about “the Tiffany problem.”

“What’s the Tiffany problem?” you ask.

Here’s some of what he said:

“In 2019 article, novelist Jo Walton wrote about keeping things true to life in historical fiction…but not so true that the audience thinks it’s false. ‘There’s also what I call the Tiffany Problem — your readers are modern people and know what they know, which is fine except when what they know isn’t actually right. For instance, the name Tiffany sounds extremely modern to us. It feels jarring when we read it as a character name in a historical setting… But our instinct is wrong, because Tiffany…was fairly common in medieval England and France….’”

The entire post is HERE.​

So why “the Tiffany problem” as my post today?

It reminded me of a time when someone I know complained about scenes in “A Quiet Passion,” a biopic about Emily Dickinson, beause the poet was shown carrying a parasol.  He said it was “not accurate” and “too antebellum.”

Hmm.

I reminded him that Dickinson wrote a few (four to be exact) poems with the word “parasol,” including “Her little parasol to lift” and “The parasol is the umbrella’s daughter.”

BTW:  I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that it just dawned on me that “parasol” in Spanish is “for sun.”  I never thought about that before!

Turns out “parasol” is from Latin/French “para” – to shield from – so “to shield from the sun.”  An umbrella in French is “parapluie,” to shidl from the rain.  And “parachute” is a related term too – “to shield from a fall.”