Hearing the name Tiffany in a historical film or reading it in a historical book may distract the audience from the story momentarily since, surely, people were not named Tiffany centuries ago. It’s a modern name, right? But the name Tiffany indeed came from the historical name Theophania, which originated in the 12th century.

The Tiffany Effect, or the Tiffany Problem, refers to terms that seem modern but, in fact, have much older roots. The name Tiffany inspired the term because most people think Tiffany is modern name when it is instead centuries old. The term was coined by the fantasy and science fiction writer Jo Walton. 

Drawing Historical Conclusions

The Tiffany Effect happens when people perceive popular culture in mediums like books, sitcoms, or movies to be historically inaccurate because they seem to be too modern when they’re actually not, says Jennifer B. Delfino, Ph.D., an anthropologist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. 

“It’s a natural outcome of how people are educated into thinking of culture and society in particular ways and in particular contexts,” says Delfino. “It says a lot about our contemporary thinking and the ideas that we think are modern.”

For an anthropologist like Delfino, the more interesting part is why people are oriented to ideas about historical accuracy rather than whether something is indeed historically accurate. “People perceive things within a certain lens that may cause them to draw conclusions,” she says.

We have these expectations about what the past was like based on our own perspective, which can be imperfect, says Ben Whately, a linguist, and co-founder of the language learning app Memrise.

“The Tiffany Effect is a projection onto the past as though the past were a foreign country,” he adds. We form these ideas of what things in the past were like when we really don’t know. 

Read More: When Did Humans Evolve Language?

Examples of the Tiffany Effect

Certain names are excellent examples of the Tiffany Effect. For example, the name Shane might sound modern when, in fact, it harkens back to a 17th-century Gaelic name. While Wade is a name that seems recent, it’s rooted in Early English culture and comes from the Old English term, which means Old wadan or “to go.” 

Additionally, we often think that love and sex were far more buttoned up in the Victorian Era when bedrooms of married couples were separate and public signs of affection were much less common. But we know that the birth rate was actually much higher back then, and people were definitely getting together, even though they might have shown it in slightly different ways. 

We may also look to the past and think that cultures were much more closed than they were when this might not be true. Some societies that existed long ago may have had more feminist, racially equal, sexually open, and, in some ways, freer societies when we just assume that’s not the case.

Why Is the Tiffany Effect Important?

The Tiffany Effect is important because it’s an indicator that we’re making generalizations about the past that we don’t know to be true because it’s based on insufficient data, says Whately. We can think of the past as another culture and or another group of people who were thinking in another way or living within a different set of rules. This tells us that maybe we should take a step back and reevaluate our biases.

“These Tiffany moments are canaries in the coal mine to show us that we’re making a whole lot of (sometimes inaccurate) assumptions about what life was like back then,” says Whately.

Read More: Language Evolves Over Time and Islands Can Drive Linguistic Diversity

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Sara Novak is a science journalist based in South Carolina. In addition to writing for Discover, her work appears in Scientific American, Popular Science, New Scientist, Sierra Magazine, Astronomy Magazine, and many more. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism from the Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia. She’s also a candidate for a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University, (expected graduation 2023).