In the last 40 years can you remember an adult lead character choosing to ride a bike as a form of transportation in an American movie or tv series?
If a minor character has a bike and uses it for transportation - it’s clear they would like a car but for whatever reason they don’t have one. Another character might say to them “Why don’t you have a car?” and their reply will be something like “Don’t ask.”
Last night I watched “Flashdance (1983)”. Jennifer Beals plays an 18 year-old who lives on her own and she doesn’t have a car. She uses a bike instead.
I checked and it’s just their jargon for “diegetic,” for when someone wants to say “in-universe” but in an obtuse and weird referential way instead of just using an esoteric word.
I really wonder if some people at that site, reddit, and similar sites use words like “diegetic” and “in medias res” in spoken speech to sound sophisticated.
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It’s a shame TV Tropes probably has 100s of times as much text as it should. Maybe one day somebody will scrape the entire site and stick the text into AI. They’ll give AI a prompt like “Remove the wheat from the chaff and convert to everyday English”. If that ever happens - man, will the TV Tropes editors be mad!
But Less Is More and Too Clever Is Dumb and Those Are the Breaks.
I mean I use random esoteric words in normal speech, because my brain is broken and when I reach for a word the filter is just “does this match what I’m trying to say” and considerations like “is this is a normal word or something I’ve only ever seen written a single digit number of times and that I inferred the meaning of from context?”, “is this the correct language?”, or “did I just synthesize this word from roots just now?” get skipped over until I’ve already said it.
But you’ve not showing off.