We all make snap judgments about people based on trivial and frankly completely unwarranted things, and one of these is people’s names. I’m sure we’re aware that ‘Karen’ has become synonymous – however unfairly – with a privileged white woman in countless social media videos, and how racists use names more popular in other cultures to belittle people they can pigeonhole and dismiss without having to engage. See US Republicans’ tendency to insist on using Barack Hussain Obama’s full name on the numerous occasions he gets the blame for all of America’s ills.
Names come and go in fashion, and monikers popular in my generation have almost died out. In 2014, Nigel and Barry were in 2,079th place in the list of popular boys names and, in the same year, only 33 newborn boys in the UK were named Gary.
One name – Tiffany – gave rise to its own ‘problem’, based on how people relate to its use in historical drama. The fantasy novelist, Jo Walton, coined the term:
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, where we’d be quite happy with names like Anna and Jane. But our instinct is wrong, because Tiffany is a form of Theophania, and it was fairly common in medieval England and France. It went out of fashion later, and it’s because we don’t have seventeenth to nineteenth century examples that it feels modern.
We often use heuristics like this to put concepts into places as we map the world around us, and sometimes they can be spectacularly wrong, especially when placing things into history.
Electric vehicles
In July 2026, just under 28% of new car sales in the UK were BEVs (battery electric vehicles) and another 28% made up from HEVs (hybrid EVs) and PHEVs (plug-in hybrid EVs). From near zero just 15 years ago, electric cars of one type or another are now making up 50% of sales.
But in the early days of powered road vehicles, battery power vied for sales with internal combustion engines on a similarly equal footing and, as early as 1842 – just 14 years after Stephenson’s Rocket won the Rainhill trials – Scottish engineer Robert Davidson built an electric locomotive and tested it on the Edinburgh-Glasgow railway line. Though ultimately unsuccessful (it only managed 4mph and had non-rechargeable batteries) it was a proof of concept, even if the directors of the railway were short-sighted to the possibilities. Had they been otherwise, perhaps Europe would not be on fire this summer.
Before the train, and many years before Carl Benz would patent his first petrol car, Davidson had built and demonstrated a four-wheeled electric car. The worlds first.
Sales of EVs kept pace with Internal combustion until early years of the 20th century – in 1900 they made up 28% of US car sales. However, once road networks began to spread and the availability of cheap, easily available fossil fuel increased, the limited range, speed and lack of a recharging network meant EVs became niche, suitable only in specific and limited situations.
Turning left on an aeroplane
Ever wondered why passengers turn left to head up to the good seats (on large planes that are boarded from the middle)? These seats are always at the front, but in that case, why didn’t we ever board on the other side of the plane and turn right, even if using steps rather than an airbridge?
This actually goes back a very long way. Long before aircraft.
Aeronautics takes a lot of vocabulary from the age of ships – even its name is derived from the Greek ‘nautikos’, referring to shipping and sailors. ‘Captain’, ‘pilot’, ‘steward’, and ‘boarding’ are just some of such examples. Before the stern-post rudder, ships were steered by a paddle on the starboard side – from the Old English ‘steorbord’, ‘steor’ meaning steer, and ‘bord’ meaning side. This meant that ships would tie up in harbour on the opposite ‘port’ side, so passengers came aboard from there.
The convention of boarding on the left carried across to aircraft, and so when you find yourself getting on a sufficiently large aeroplane, the posh seats are off to your left.
Fizzy drinks
Most readers are likely to know of the late Victorian invention of various cola flavoured soft drinks: Coca Cola and Dr Pepper in the 1880s, and Pepsi in the 1890s. Similarly, other famous fizzy drinks are from the same period or afterwards: Irn Bru (as IRONBREW) in 1889, 7Up in 1928, Fanta in the 1940s and Sprite in the 1950s.
But carbonated drinks are much older. Natural fizzy water was available in springs, and has been known since at least Roman times, and likely even earlier. As Pliny the Elder (d79CE – the guy who sailed into the Bay of Naples, just as Pompeii was being buried ahead of him) wrote:
The state of the Tungri, in Gaul, has a spring of great renown, which sparkles as it bursts forth with bubbles innumerable, and has a certain ferruginous taste, only to be perceived after it has been drunk.
Beer and wine absorbs cardon dioxide as part of the process of fermentation and, though mostly consumed flat, some brews left it in. It was fermenting beer that led the British scientist Joseph Priestly (the guy who came up with ‘dephlogisticated air‘) to perfect an industrial process to create fizzy water.
Suspending a bowl of water over fermenting beer in a Leeds brewery, he observed that the water absorbed the “fixed air”, as he called it. It tasted nice, so he worked on it further, eventually publishing his findings in his 1772 publication, “Impregnating Water with Fixed Air”. His methods were improved by the Swiss amateur chemist, Johann Jacob Schweppe, who created a commercial enterprise in London just 15 years later. His “soda water” made him rich and famous.
Just a few decades later, it was cheap enough to be accessible to most of the population (though mostly as a drug delivery method) and it stayed this way until the early 20th century. Coca Cola had phased out cocaine by 1929, and even 7Up had stopped being marketed as a drink to be given to babies mixed with milk, though some readers may be old enough to remember Lucozade sold in chemists as a cure-all for ill schoolchildren up until the 1980s.
Humans have long sought out the sensation of bubbles in the mouth. Even before the production of counter-top soda machines, it would not be unusual to see people drinking it, at the same time as Joe Priestly was discovering laughing gas and Humphrey Davey was loving the effects.
Repercussions of a minor issue
Seeing these things in a historical drama, and believing they are out of place, is pretty trivial. We all use heuristics from the real world when mapping a fictional or imaginary world, and spotting out-of-place things can pull us from the state of the suspended disbelief we willingly enter. Mostly we just shrug it off and get annoyed at the scriptwriter.
However, the same idea – thinking things are out of place in the created worlds presented to us – can have real-world implications. When certain politicians complain of seeing too many ‘brown faces on TV’, or when comment pages are full of complaints about Idris Elba or Atta Yaqub being suggested for the fictional role of James Bond – because, of course Bond can only ever be played by a white, male actor – they reveal their own prejudicial heuristics in judging what they are consuming.
The Tiffany problem is not the biggest concern in the world, and it is mostly restricted to writers of historical fiction. But the concept is a reminder that we need to guard against trusting our heuristics when interacting with various media, however we consume it, as they may reveal not just our ignorance, but also our biases and bigotries.
