Axanar, so very true.
Do you speak future?
- Thread starter Adventerprise
- Start date
Somehow, decades before, they knew
Wow, that's mostly a list of childish insults and racial slurs. I doubt people who talked like that would be allowed into Starfleet Academy to begin with. (Also note the presumptive heteronormativity that "Sensors locked" only applies to a member of the opposite sex. Which shows a poor understanding of college culture, I think, even for the 1980s.) The FASA TNG Officer's Manual is a bottomless font of bad and bizarre ideas, isn't it?
Although there is, unfortunately, a canonical equivalent. Jeri Taylor had Federation civilians use "Vulky" as a derogatory term in the Voyager novel Mosaic and the episode "Real Life."
Well frak that!
The original BSG was an interesting mix of colloquial, future slang, and a certain formal presence that felt futuristic and otherworldly compared to ours. I suppose the only other direction would to have everyone say "do re mi fa" but that's on par with "ug" and "grunt". Everyone speaking modern day feels like 90210, corny right out of the gate and unconvincing in setting up a future-human environment.
I suppose.
A couple fun things on that...
1. The pilot to 1970's "All in the Family" had Gloria saying monosyllabic slang like "sophis", instead of "sophisticated". But that was quickly abandoned for showing "the younger generation"... Relational tangents aside but also come to think of it, Mike and Gloria rarely said "groovy" as well, which quaintly leads us into:
2. Even the TOS Eden episode eschewed the easiest low-hanging fruit of using late-60s slang to show "the space hippies". Never mind the equally obvious, for then or now, would intended audiences (or otherwise) stand Kirk saying "groovy" or "squares" every 10 minutes?
No need, when they came up with future slang instead. Do you reach, brother? That's real now. No Herberts here.
Well frak that!
I remain crushed that "frell" (from Farscape) never caught on the way frak did.
I remain crushed that "frell" (from Farscape) never caught on the way frak did.
Yeah, it's such a load of felgercarb.
Even those feel Sixtyish.
Because they're from the 60's.
In retrospect, sure, but to '60s audiences, they probably felt futuristic. Attempts to project into the future rarely rid themselves of the unexamined assumptions of the era in which they're introduced, so what feels futuristic at the time will end up feeling dated in retrospect.
For instance, when Bill Theiss put Jame Finney in a metallic sailor suit in "Court Martial," he was thinking "Metallic clothes = futuristic," but could not have predicted that the time-honored practice of school-age children wearing sailor suits would become obsolete relatively soon (except for schoolgirls in Japan).
Speaking as a member of the Sixties audience, to my young ears they sounded contemporary.
Maybe so, but that doesn't mean they were intended to, since of course the episode was set in the future. Naturally the Space Hippies were intended to resemble their 1960s counterparts, but not to actually be from the 1960s. So the intent was presumably to create slang that was reminiscent of how hippies talked while still being different.
I mean, nobody in the sixties was using "Herbert" as a synonym for "square" or "the Man" or whatever. And they said "I dig" instead of "I reach." Analogous, but different.
Which is my point. They sounded like something from the 1960s. The slang could have been concocted for a contemporary drama rather than a futuristic one.
That doesn't mean it was meant to sound like it was from the 1960s, for the obvious reason that the show was set in the future. It just means they failed to convince you of what they were aiming for. The episode fails on a lot of levels.
Maybe not by the TNG era - but don't forget that we have this exchange about Klingons between crew members in TUC:
- Crewman #1: "They all look alike."
- Crewman #2: "What about that smell? You know only the top of the line models can even talk and..."
But TUC wrote the crew badly out of character by depicting their hostility toward Klingons as racially based, conflicting with "The Day of the Dove" (where it took an alien entity to artificially induce such feelings in them and Kirk & crew rejected them) and even the immediately previous movie (which ended with the Enterprise crew and the Klingons dining together and getting along fairly comfortably). It was a hamfisted attempt on the part of TUC's writers to make the movie an allegory for present-day tensions, but it didn't even work in that context, since the movie's plot was an allegory for the fall of the Soviet Union, and US-Soviet tensions were never about ethnicity, just politics and ideology.
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