Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2010

Anachorism.  

_The Oxford Companion to the English Language_ gives as an example
tigers in Africa in an Edgar Rice Burroughs story.

Or anatopism.  Onelook.com gets some hits on it.  For example, with
lots of quotations, <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/anatopism>.

The online _Oxford English Dictionary_ calls 'anatopism' rare and has
the following entry for it:

    anatopism
    rare.
    A putting of a thing out of its proper place, a faulty
    arrangement.
    1812 COLERIDGE Rem. I. 317 In arranging which [books] the
    puzzled librarian must commit an anachronism in order to avoid
    an anatopism.
    1850 DE QUINCEY Wks. XVI. 72 Geographical blunders, or
    what might be called anatopisms.

_OED_ has:

    anachorism
    nonce-wd.
    Something out of place in, or foreign to, the country.
    1862 LOWELL Bigl. Papers Ser. II. 55 Opinions [that are]
    anachronisms and anachorisms, foreign both to the age and
    the country.

Interesting to see, both words are formed on Greek roots, and '-top-'
and '-chor-' are both Greek roots meaning 'place' according to the
_OED_ etymologies.

By the way, I would have thought there !were! tigers in Africa, but
some Wikipedia hits say no, not naturally.

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.

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.

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