Why Did Data Know So Little About Idioms?

[Red Ranger]

People:

There is an aspect of Data's character that always intrigued and irritated me: his lack of knowledge about the human condition in general, and human idioms in particular.

In Redemption, Pt. II, he states he's been in Starfleet for about 26 years, if I remember right -- don't know if that means four years at Starfleet Academy. That means that by the time he served on Enterprise, he must have served in Starfleet at least 19 years. Also, he must have served on other ships or bases before becoming Picard's second officer. So surely, some of the humans he's served with must've used the word snoop, the word he didn't know in Encounter at Farpoint.

First off, this seeming contradiction is a bit silly. However, I have a couple of ideas on how this can be possible, taking a cue from a VOY ep involving how the Doctor's memories were damaged.

At some point in the past, Data might have suffered some damage which led to selective memory loss, specifically, a subroutine dedicated to human idioms and customs. The officers he served with were able to correct some of the damage, but weren't able to restore him to full working order simply because he's a one-of-a-kind android. This could also explain why someone with his abiliites had not risen beyond the rank of lieutenant commander -- he suffered some kind of setback.

Another possibility: Perhaps Data served more with starship crews where the majority weren't human, so he had limited contact with human expressions and culture.

I always thought it would've made more sense for Data to be so ignorant of human customs if he was a newly minted Starfleet officer, an ensign. That could've worked if they had cast a younger actor like Gedde Watanabe in the role.

What do you all think?

Red Ranger

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

I recall from somewhere that after Lore, Soong purposely made Data not as humanlike--perhaps he simply chose not to program Data with a full grasp of idioms, making him have to learn it along the way...similar to the whole business with contractions and the lack thereof.

 

[SchwEnt]

Yeah, I agree that something doesn't seem quite right about this aspect of Data.
As mentioned, he's been in Starfleet for 20+ years before EaF.
So what's he been doing for two decades??

He's such an inquisitive fellow, with his exploration of humanity and all that.
He seeks to learn "what is funny?" and so on.

So he only starts tackling these issues once he comes aboard the Enterprise?
Was he on "pause" for twenty years?

And look at all his development in just the few years from EaF to AGT.
Shouldn't he have been more evolved after all his years prior to the beginning of TNG?

Doesn't seem quite right to me.
Maybe something *did* happen where whole sections of his positronic mind were lost or damaged or whatever.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Perhaps his desire to emulate humanity was a relatively recent development in his growth as of EAF. When he was first activated, he might have acted a lot less human, and slowly learned the basics.

It's also possible that on his early assignments, he'd been treated more as a thing than a person, and wasn't encouraged to try to fit in with humans.

BTW, I think he'd been discovered 18 years prior to Season 1.

But yeah, the "snoop" thing just seems like an early error because they hadn't thought everything out yet. My favorite example of this sort of thing is in "Justice" when Riker says, "When in Rome," to which Worf replies, "When in where, sir?" That would have worked if Worf had been raised among the Klingons, and we didn't know any better at the time...but I don't think there's any reasonable way that he could have been raised by humans and attended human schools, including the Academy on Earth, and never heard of Rome.

 

[Red Ranger]

Perhaps his desire to emulate humanity was a relatively recent development in his growth as of EAF. When he was first activated, he might have acted a lot less human, and slowly learned the basics.

It's also possible that on his early assignments, he'd been treated more as a thing than a person, and wasn't encouraged to try to fit in with humans.

BTW, I think he'd been discovered 18 years prior to Season 1.

But yeah, the "snoop" thing just seems like an early error because they hadn't thought everything out yet. My favorite example of this sort of thing is in "Justice" when Riker says, "When in Rome," to which Worf replies, "When in where, sir?" That would have worked if Worf had been raised among the Klingons, and we didn't know any better at the time...but I don't think there's any reasonable way that he could have been raised by humans and attended human schools, including the Academy on Earth, and never heard of Rome.

Interesting points. It's conceivable Data wasn't treated like a sentient being in the beginning of his Starfleet career, since even years later, Commander Maddox and Lieutenant Commander Hobson treated him like that.

Perhaps, like his dream program didn't kick in until years later, he had a curiousity subroutine that had just been activated prior to joining Enterprise.

And I agree that Worf not knowing about Rome, given his background growing up among humans, made no sense. They handled it right in Q-Pid, when he knows who Robin Hood and his Merry Men are when he yells, "I protest! I am NOT a Merry Man!"

Red Ranger

 

[Andrew Harris]

Like every other character, Data developed over time--and not just on the show, but in the writer's room. The trait about idioms (and contractions) is something that the writers developed as the show went on, as a shorthand way to demonstrate his difficulty in becoming more human, struggling with even the ordinary things that we all understand as second-nature.

This happens all the time, on Trek as well as other shows, and not just with characters, either. On Friends, Monica didn't become a neat-freak until the show had already hit its stride (her original character arc was "mother hen" to the rest of them.) And do you remember the Season One TNG episode that introduced the Holodeck? Picard talks about it like he's never seen one before, and as if it's just been installed on his ship practically yesterday.

 

[Timo]

My favorite example of this sort of thing is in "Justice" when Riker says, "When in Rome," to which Worf replies, "When in where, sir?" That would have worked if Worf had been raised among the Klingons, and we didn't know any better at the time...but I don't think there's any reasonable way that he could have been raised by humans and attended human schools, including the Academy on Earth, and never heard of Rome.

Oh, I think it's particularly appropriate for Worf...

Sure, he might have been raised by humans. But he wasn't raised by Americans - it would appear that for a large part, he was raised by Byelorussians. And they don't use the expression "When in Rome". And whatever American literature Worf was reading, the phrase need not have stuck in his mind from there. Odds are, Worf was mostly reading Klingon propaganda anyway.

Also, when Riker says "Rome", what is our Klingon going to hear? "Romulans? Where? Where? Permission to shoot freely, Sir?" The name of an obscure Earth city would certainly not be his first guess.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Old Mixer]

^Not buying it. It's not the meaning of the saying that Worf was expressing confusion about, it was the name of the place. Rome is studied today as a powerful ancient civilization, I don't see where that would change in 400 years to the point where the name isn't even recognized...nor is there anything "Americacentric" about knowing what "Rome" refers to.

If anything, I think a Klingon being raised and educated by humans would have focused his studies on elements of human culture that resonated with his Klingon heritage...and there was no shortage of military conquest and political intrigue in the Roman Empire.

 

[Timo]

It's not the meaning of the saying that Worf was expressing confusion about, it was the name of the place.

Why would you assume that?

Surely Worf would have that reaction even if he knew perfectly well that a city named Rome existed. He is not in Rome. He's not on Earth. He's not even in a city, really. Claiming that he is in Rome surely elicits an "I must have misheard you" response.

That is, the natural response to "Aw, don't fold now, you Klingon coward!" on the poker table would be "Klingon what?!" even when Worf very well knows what a "coward" is. It's so out of context there that it requires such expression of disbelief.

nor is there anything "Americacentric" about knowing what "Rome" refers to.

But the saying "When in Rome, do as the Romans do" (supposedly from St Ambrose's writings) is highly anglocentric. Or eastern Mediterranean / Black Sea -centric, as it's also known in Turkish, Romanian, Bulgarian etc. Apparently, it never caught on elsewhere, including Italy...

If anything, I think a Klingon being raised and educated by humans would have focused his studies on elements of human culture that resonated with his Klingon heritage...and there was no shortage of military conquest and political intrigue in the Roman Empire.

But the Romans never used the above saying, so Worf still wouldn't know that the name of the old empire could evoked so grossly out of context.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Old Mixer]

^Alright, I see the basis of your rationalization--but it's still just a rationalization, IMO.

 

[SchwEnt]

Right. Worf doesn't know about Rome.
But he knows Minsk

 

[trekker670]

I understand them having Data and Worf not knowing all of Hman customs in the early episodes since their characters werent fully developed, but I though it was out of place for Data to not understand the "Raincheck" reference in "These are the Voyages"

 

[Christopher]

Understanding idiomatic speech is not merely a question of factual knowledge, it's a question of emotional and social comprehension. The distinctions between literal and figurative or ironic speech are conveyed by subtleties of expression, delivery, and social context. In real life, people with high-function Asperger's Syndrome and similar autistic-spectrum conditions often have difficulty understanding when someone is speaking figuratively. It doesn't matter if the people in question are 25 or 30 or even 50 years old; it's intrinsically hard for them to recognize the social and emotional cues that most people take for granted. Also, they think in precise terms and so have a strong tendency to take things literally. There's even a book out there that exists to help Asperger's patients understand idiomatic speech:

http://www.amazon.com/Asperger-Dict...r_1_21?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1220133621&sr=8-21

I used to have the same skepticism about Data's difficulty with idioms -- "After over two decades, he should understand them perfectly!" But once I learned that there are people in real life with the same difficulty, it made sense. As a being without emotional awareness and a tendency toward literal, precise thinking, Data is very much like a person with high-function Asperger's. So it stands to reason that he would have the same social difficulties, and understanding idiomatic speech is part of that.

 

[The Old Mixer]

^So what took ya?

It's conceivable Data wasn't treated like a sentient being in the beginning of his Starfleet career, since even years later, Commander Maddox and Lieutenant Commander Hobson treated him like that.

Not to mention Pulaski when she first came aboard....

 

[Christopher]

^^Yeah, that's a theme I addressed in my novel The Buried Age, which explores how Picard and Data first met (among other things). Pretty much everyone outside the Enterprise crew seemed to treat Data as a machine, so I wanted to explore why Picard felt differently and gave him the chance to grow. I asserted that for most of his pre-TNG career, Data had been treated pretty much the way some here have suggested -- shunted aside, not engaged socially or encouraged to interact with other people.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Yeah, I always somehow got that vibe that Picard's particular interest in Data's development was the exception, not the rule...Picard being the remarkable person that he is and all. I don't think that prejudice against Data would have been universal, but it would have been common to varying degrees. He probably would have had some supporters along the way. But his detractors could have been a bigger obstacle in earlier times. On the one hand, they did let him go through the Academy like any sentient being...on the other, nobody bothered to actually declare him legally sentient for two decades.

 

[Tomalak]

I thought it was silly that he couldn't say, well, "couldn't" or any other contractions.

A useful plot device for one episode perhaps, but it made no sense later on.

 

[The Old Mixer]

^Especially since, IIRC, Spiner slipped up once in awhile on that. Don't ask me exactly when.

 

[Christopher]

To be fair, "Datalore" never said he was incapable of using contractions, just that he tended to speak formally. More of a habit than a mental block. (In fact, he used two or three contractions earlier in that same episode.) Unfortunately, a couple of later episodes like "The Offspring" treated it as though he couldn't use contractions at all, which was really silly, especially since he never had trouble using contractions when quoting others or reciting dialogue.

My take -- which was influenced by some good arguments someone on this forum made -- is that using contractions was something he had to think about; it had to be a conscious affectation rather than a natural part of his speech pattern. In The Buried Age, I suggested that Data was trying to act more human in his early years on the E-D, feigning emotion and making an effort to speak more informally; this was to explain his different characterization in the first two seasons (since the whole "androids can't feel" nonsense didn't come along until "The Ensigns of Command"). I even managed to slip an "I've" into Data's dialogue, though CBS Licensing wouldn't let me address the contraction issue directly. The implication was that later on, when Data got more comfortable that the crew would accept him, he dropped the affectations and started to be himself. And part of that was that he stopped making an effort to pepper his speech with contractions. (Well, most of the time. Spiner did let a few slip through.)

By that interpretation, the big deal about Lal using a contraction in "The Offspring" wasn't that she'd used one at all, but that she'd used it without thinking. She'd internalized a behavioral pattern from her peers rather than simply putting it on as an external act.

 

[Red Ranger]

Christopher:

Your take on Data in your novel is interesting. But is it realistic to think that the only Starfleet officer that would treat Data as more than just a walking encyclopedia would be Picard, as exceptional and sensitive as he is? After all, several of the other officers on Enterprise also treated Data like a person, even though both Commander Riker, and esp. Dr. Pulaski, had some trepidation about him.
I always thought there must be some officer who became an early mentor of Data in the ways of humanity, a bit like how he became Q's "professor of the humanities" in Deja Q. An early sponsor, perhaps even the captain of the ship that discovered Data.

As for prejudice against Data, we did see it against the Doctor in VOY. As I recall, he was miffed he was treated like a device by several crew members and made his grievances known to Janeway. Given Data's inoffensive nature, he probably would have just been curious about similar reactions to him by other crew members.

Red Ranger