Trope-a-Day: Call a Smeerp a "Rabbit"

Call a Smeerp a “Rabbit”: Another unfortunate aspect of Translation Convention.  As described under Taxonomic Term Confusion, Eldraeic has a means of classifying – and words for – species-groups classified by homology alone, so that people can talk about the winged flying creatures that exist on multiple planets easily – without having to resort to a bunch of tedious explanations about “bird-analogs”, especially when there’s not a single ecology of origin for everyone to get their analogs from anyway.

Unfortunately, English doesn’t.  Which means that, footnote it as I might, “trees” includes many things that are not part of kingdom Plantae, “birds” includes Elieran four-winged flyers, “fish” includes Phílae’s armed – um, arm-possessing – fish-analogues and Revallá’s tubefish, and so on and so forth.