I think this works just fine for contemporary audiences who would have absolutely no idea what "sawbones" is all about.
Why do you assume contemporary audiences are so ignorant?
It's not dumbing down. It's just acknowledging that a term has become more archaic or obscure over the decades, so you can't assume that it's common knowledge anymore. Times changes, audiences, change, and the point is to communicate with the audience, not confuse them. So you make adjustments to accommodate that.
On the one hand, I agree with you: the point of any storytelling is to communicate with the audience. (Of course, this compels the question of who exactly the audience is intended to
be, and implicates the art-vs-commerce tension of writing for those who will most appreciate the work, vs. trying to attract the largest possible audience for commercial reasons.)
On the other hand, the broader the audience one tries to attract, the more this impulse toward communication
does incentivize "dumbing things down," because one can't really be sure what constitutes "common knowledge" for the audience, so the safest assumption is "next to nothing."
I think that's an impulse worth resisting. I tend to operate on the assumption, undeniably somewhat solipsistic but not otherwise unreasonable, that if I know something (outside my personal fields of professional expertise), it qualifies as "common knowledge." Granted I'm pretty widely read, but the underlying point is that the information is
out there—more easily accessible than ever in this day and age—and if other people are so incurious as not to have acquired it, and not to ask questions or otherwise seek more information when they encounter something unfamiliar, then the fault for that lies entirely on them, not on the person trying to communicate with them.
On the third hand (for good measure), we shouldn't forget that we're talking about
science fiction here, a genre that by its very nature inherently involves speculation about concepts (cultural, scientific, and otherwise) that are
not necessarily common knowledge, and may even be entirely invented. The audience for SF has always been dominated by people who are more educated and more intellectually curious than the population at large, or at the very least more comfortable with unfamiliar concepts. Obscure references just come with the territory.
The fact that much of the humorous wordplay in Shakespeare is not immediately intelligible to a lot of contemporary readers has nothing to do with folks being dumber or poorly informed.
Perhaps. (Although comparisons to popular understanding of Shakespeare just a few generations ago may make that arguable... still, I gather your point is that the main culprit is evolving language.) However, that's definitely not an excuse to change a single word in Shakespeare.
And c'mon, everyone, this shouldn't have to be an either-or thing! If ST09 really felt the need to explain Bones's nickname, a single line of dialogue making joking reference to the word "sawbones" would have served the purpose just as well as the contrivance the film actually used, and clued in any unfamiliar members of the audience
without doing violence to the nickname's etymology!
