Greg wins.
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What pet peeves do you have about trek books?
- Thread starter Garm Bel Iblis
- Start date
He does, but he got a beeYOUteeful setup from Christopher and seigezunt!
As for the OP, no doubt others have said something similar, but here's my two cents.
My biggest peeve with Trek lit is when the characters in the book don't act like the characters on the screen. This isn't so bad when the books are set a considerable time after the timeline of the show (or movies), but it happens when this isn't the situation as well.
Kirk, for example, is always (in my experience, but I confess that I haven't read too many TOS books just for this reason) much less of a horndog than he was on the show. That would be OK - sensibilities have changed over the years, and thank goodness for that, and most people do grow up sooner or later. But at least in the books I've read recently, he's not merely no longer a horndog - he's St. James the Pure. Cleaned up is good; sanitized is a bit too much, IMO.
But my second biggest peeve is when you have an entire scenario that just ain't right.
Example: Q-in-Law by Peter David. Now, I rather like this book - it's not my favorite Trek novel nor is it my favorite Q novel, but it was entertaining and I enjoyed it. But for some reason or other David created the following scenario: An official, formal reception at which Starfleet officers are not only required to attend but they are required to attend with a date and the men are required to wear dress uniforms while the women - including Starfleet personnel - wear gowns.
What's the deal with that? Since when does an official reception on a Starfleet vessel require a date? It's an official reception - it's work. You don't require your officers to pair off, like animals going aboard the Ark. And officers wear uniforms at official events, not stunning evening gowns.
The entire reason for the "must have a date" thing, as far as I could tell, was so that David could create a situation in which Wesley could experience young-adult angst over not having a date. What the reason might be for the evening gowns, I don't know - it seemed to be an excuse for Picard to be knocked out by Crusher's loveliness in her stunning evening gown, but maybe there's another reason there and I just missed it. But dang it, she's a officer, and she should have been in uniform.
Well, I just hate that stuff. Surely a reason could have been invented for Wesley to have to have a date that didn't make an official Enterprise function sound more like prom night.
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I wish they'd use ' as an aspirant instead of a syllable stop, though.
Sometimes it's necessary, I suppose--Tpring and T'Pring would be said and read the same way, but you'd run into a problem with diphthongs like (for example) T'Spock, which would if rendered Tspock would be very different. At the same time, T-aleph-Pring is different from Tpring, too, so I guess it's just a matter of what you're used to. Cyrillic avoids many of these problem with its many letters; I find it funny that Roman has fewer, and wastes two of its 26 (in English anyway) with c and q. Useless letters, those.
Also, something I thought of as silly is creatures that appear to have spoken names for things despite the fact that they do not have the power of verbal speech. "This creature calls itself a Horta." It surely the hell does not.
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I don't read/say Tpring and T'Pring the same way, to me they are distinct.
Why is the mark there in "O'Brien" or "D'Artagnan?" Language isn't neat and orderly. Real words aren't invented out of whole cloth, but have a whole complicated history behind them that sometimes results in structural quirks whose origins don't come merely from pronunciation. In the cases I cited, they're compound words and the apostrophe denotes an elision -- "O'Brien" is basically short for "[Son] Of Brien."
Maybe "Darhe'el" used to be pronounced with two separate E sounds, but it got slurred over time. But the old spelling was preserved because that's what literate cultures tend to do -- stick with the old spellings as they were locked down when the earliest dictionaries were published. That's why so many words are spelled differently than they're pronounced. British spelling basically reflects the way English was pronounced when Johnson published his dictionary, while American spelling reflects the way American English was pronounced when Webster published his.
There are all sorts of ways in which apostrophes are used in real life in human languages. So every fictional use of an apostrophe in an alien name pretty much has a real precedent. If you have a problem with it, take it up with reality.
Maybe "Darhe'el" used to be pronounced with two separate E sounds, but it got slurred over time. But the old spelling was preserved because that's what literate cultures tend to do -- stick with the old spellings as they were locked down when the earliest dictionaries were published. That's why so many words are spelled differently than they're pronounced. British spelling basically reflects the way English was pronounced when Johnson published his dictionary, while American spelling reflects the way American English was pronounced when Webster published his.
There are all sorts of ways in which apostrophes are used in real life in human languages. So every fictional use of an apostrophe in an alien name pretty much has a real precedent. If you have a problem with it, take it up with reality.
Haha, yes, I've totally noticed this one, and it's by no means confined to Trek. I think the rationalization would be that the words and phrases would be entirely normal to their own language, but when spelled out in our language, the most accurate way is by expressing the odd sylabel combinations with apostrophes.
Nardpuncher
Rear Admiral
Thanks for fulfilling my dream! I have now had a paid writer waste about 2000 words on apostrophes!
Christopher is saying that the words carry connotations of vulgarity due to their Anglo-Saxon origins, whereas synonymous words in Latin do not. Anglo-Saxon words are considered "lower" and more vulger because English was a language used in lower society and in everday mundane matters- in contrast to Latin and French, which were used in elevated and learned society. Christopher's pointing out that "acceptable" words and "unacceptable" words often mean exactly the same thing; our attitudes of offense come not from the words' denotations but from connotations latched on to them due to other factors, such as in this case their language of origin, which leads to associations of class, courtesy levels, sophistication, etc
I understand the difference between Latinate and Germanic words in the development of the English language and associated class connotations. But I've never, not ever, heard anything to indicate curse words as being derived from a "lower" class of words and that's what makes them curses. I was fishing for more information about that specifically.
Handguns and assault rifles are literal tools, used for the purposes of killing people, and I think it's a very mature decision to refrain from using those. I think it's pretty presumptuous to say that refraining from using curses is a sign of an immature person; I think we should be moving towards a point where curses aren't needed.
And of course removing simple "shock clutter" from our language would be nice too.
As a rule, curse words are Anglo-Saxon in derivation. The f-word is Germanic, from the same root as the German word fokkein, meaning to penetrate or strike (as in the Fokker triplane flown by the Red Baron; it literally means the Striker, or perhaps the Piercer). It's considered obscene or at least vulgar, while the Latin equivalent "copulate" is considered technical. The s-word is of Germanic origin and is considered vulgar, while the Latin "excrement" or "feces" are considered technical. The "c-word" for the female genitalia is from Middle English and is considered extremely obscene, whereas Latin terms such as "vagina" or "vulva" are considered technical. What more do you need to know? The words mean exactly the same thing, but the ones from Germanic roots are considered dirty, emotive, and unspeakable while the ones from Latin roots are considered clean, scientific, and socially acceptable. I'd say that's pretty clear-cut.
That's a poor analogy, since those will always harm people, but the harmfulness of words is a socially and personally relative thing. Some people react negatively to curse words while others find them harmless. Some people use them with harsh emotional intent while others treat them merely as neutral speech particles. And which words are considered obscene changes greatly across time and cultures. As pointed out above, "golly" used to be considered a serious profanity, while now it's seen as laughably euphemistic. "Rats" was probably a very serious obscenity during and after the Black Plague, but now it's suitable for kids' comic strips. "Jerk" most likely started as a masturbation reference, but now it's lost that meaning.
That doesn't make sense. Curse words have always been part of human communication, and they serve a purpose as a means of expressing strong emotion. I agree they should be used judiciously, but even though I'm a rather clean-spoken sort in public, I think it's an extremist position to argue that they shouldn't exist at all. They have a role to play in language and interaction, and they always will. I think overusing them is unnecessary, but that's partly because it strips them of meaning and devalues them for the times when they're really useful.
Yes, it would, but that's no reason for taking it to the unrealistic extreme of eliminating them altogether.
I wound up reading the wikipedia page on "cunt." Sez it isn't possible to determine whether "cunt" is Germanic (kunta) or Latin (cunnus), and that this suggests it might just be prototypically Indo-European (gon).
Btw, your points about apostrophes are well taken, but why bother transliterating a useless aspirant/stop/whatever it is? A silly question, I guess...
Btw, your points about apostrophes are well taken, but why bother transliterating a useless aspirant/stop/whatever it is? A silly question, I guess...
Nardpuncher
Rear Admiral
I wonder why wikipedia doesn't consider the most obvious approach - that the word derives from "cunny", a cute furry animal, just like "pussy"? It might be a mere coincidence - or then the connection to "gon" might be.
It's a rationalization close to my heart, as we Finns still use the word "cunny" (local spelling "kani") to describe the little hopping pests.
Timo Saloniemi
How do you define "useless?" Apostrophes in transliteration schemes often serve meaningful purposes. Sometimes they represent a specific sound, like the apostrophe representing the glottal stop in Arabic (and Klingon, whose phonetics are largely influenced by Arabic). It's not "useless" there because it represents an actual letter, a specific sound within the language. Sometimes, the apostrophe distinguishes between two different sounds. For instance, in the old Wade-Giles transliteration method for Mandarin Chinese, ch'en would be pronounced "chen" while chen would be pronounced "zhen," and p'a would be pronounced "pa" while pa would be pronounced "ba." The apostrophe indicated that the phoneme was unvoiced while its absence indicated it was voiced. (The odd spellings are because Wade-Giles transliterations are based on Cantonese pronunciations, IIRC; also the sounds may have changed over the generations since the system was introduced.)
One could argue that it's a way of giving an impression of exoticism, and I think that's valid as an end in itself; fiction is all about creating impressions, and creating an impression of the exotic and bizarre is worthwhile when portraying aliens in science fiction. But I think it's also about realism. In reality, transliteration schemes often do employ diacritical marks and unusual spellings for a variety of reasons. So there isn't always an obvious correspondence between the way a foreign word is transliterated and the way it's pronounced. (For instance, the scheme for transliterating Vietnamese was developed by the French, so the spellings are based on French pronunciations and often seem bizarre to English speakers.)
So rendering every alien name as a simple, exact phonetic representation of how it's pronounced -- for instance, Kaylar instead of K'ehleyr -- would be oversimplified and unrealistic. Transliteration schemes, like anything else in language, have a history to them that often gives them strange patterns. A scheme without any strangeness or mystery to it would seem shallow and artificial. It would be something the writer made up out of whole cloth. It wouldn't convey a sense of having any history to it, and would be less believable as a result.
There's a dirty Coney Island joke hiding here somewhere, but I just can't find it . . . .
^ Probably has something to do with it eating the whitefish.
It's been a while since I read Q-In-Law, so I may be wrong, but couldn't it have been one of the customs of the species they were meeting with, which the crew followed out of respect? Male military in uniform, women in gowns, bring a date? Just offering that suggestion.
I've been to formal military functions where female officers/enlisted personnel were given the option to wear a gown in lieu of their uniform. It's usually something left up to the CO's discretion.
I wish 'twere so, but if so, there is no indication in the book itself. I seem to remember (I reread this maybe 6 months ago) that the crew acts like this is perfectly normal, when it is of course perfectly absurd - or at the very least, highly unusual.
It really reads as though the author was bound and determined that no logical absurdity was going to get in the way of his plot. Which was a shame - this was just the B-plot (or maybe even the C-plot), so it simply wasn't worth it, IMO.
Dayton Ward said:
If so, again, it wasn't mentioned in the book. And I can't remember this ever happening on the Enterprise anyway.
Let's face it: It was silly.
^ Did he really have to mention it? Besides, as I've been told repeatedly, despite them fighting all the wars, court-martialing people when they get out of line, wearing fancy uniforms, and pontificating about rules and regulations and duty while yelling "SIR!" all the time, Starfleet's not really the military. Instead, they're just a bunch of eggheads who apparently read a book or download a training program for the holodeck when it's time to go into battle. So, it's easy to understand how they might not observe every little bit of time-honored military protocol.
^ Did he really have to mention it? Besides, as I've been told repeatedly, despite them fighting all the wars, court-martialing people when they get out of line, wearing fancy uniforms, and pontificating about rules and regulations and duty while yelling "SIR!" all the time, Starfleet's not really the military. Instead, they're just a bunch of eggheads who apparently read a book or download a training program for the holodeck when it's time to go into battle. So, it's easy to understand how they might not observe every little bit of time-honored military protocol.
But to give you a straight answer to your "question," Dayton...yeah, he really did have to mention it, just because there are people like me out there. Picky people. People who dislike unnecessary plot points. People who will say, "Wait a minute. Since when do Starfleet officers have to have dates in order to attend an official function?"
I could have overlooked the uniform thing, but the "must have a date thing"? No.
In case you haven't read it recently or at all, it really was presented that way. Riker and Picard, for example, both mention that they have to attend and they have to escort somebody. Like Picard would be tossed out of the joint if he didn't have a gal on his arm?
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