Do you speak future?
- Thread starter Adventerprise
- Start date
That's what he thought.
That term could just as easily be applied to a replicator, couldn't it? It wasn't, but perhaps it's the class of device both transporters and replicators belong to.
Well, that was the point -- he was trying to downplay the severity of his condition in the present by joking that it was less debilitating than that wild night he had. It's not about whether he actually believed it; it was a rhetorical device to reassure his friend, or to act tough and unconcerned about his current condition.
Or possibly also to conceal his powers until the right moment, strategically speaking.
Of course I speak future. I know how to name two real people followed by a fictional one, just like Newton, Einstein, and Surak.
No respect for my offspring.
Is there an appreciable difference anymore between present day Humans speak vs Trek future ones? One of the amusing things about having people from another (our) era in the future is the linguistic disconnect (Data confusing a homemaker for a construction worker, etc.)
Yet if one of the modern Trek show characters interacted with someone from 2025, would there be as much of a difference between their speech and ours, aside from references to events/people that haven't happened/been born yet as of 2025? Perhaps between us and aliens unfamiliar with Human culture in general.
Yet if one of the modern Trek show characters interacted with someone from 2025, would there be as much of a difference between their speech and ours, aside from references to events/people that haven't happened/been born yet as of 2025? Perhaps between us and aliens unfamiliar with Human culture in general.
I suppose the military(-ish) speak has less differences than civilian slang.
Do you have an easier time understanding Christopher (or Kirk) because they sound more military than the cast of Giligan's Island?
I often think of how First Contact (film) accentuated the Enterprise crew not always understanding Cochrane when his manner of speech would not have been out of place in any other Star Trek episode.
Star Trek people talk like present day Americans on "family" television. Always have. Probably always will.
In Amok Time Kirk talks about the birds and the bees. A very common phrase then and (I think) for decades after. Less in use now, I think because people will just say "sex".
It's not consistent; sometimes they try to accentuate it, sometimes they don't. If it serves the plot by being amusing, we sound funny to them and vice versa. If it doesn't, we don't.
There will always be idioms that fall in and out of fans or over time. New ones that reflect the times and others that stand the test of time.
That's nothing compared to his reference to dipping little girls' pigtails in inkwells.
Kirk's well-read. Every now and then he drops some vernacular from one of the books on his reading list just to try it out.
Groovy aged very well! Bruce Campbell for one is helping there. Paris says "pretty groovy" in Future's End, and in the 90s it was considered retro is the joke, but watching it in 2025 I think actually it's timeless!Depends on the character as well: Spock is going to speak more formally, McCoy is going to be folksier, Kirk is somewhere in the middle -- and good thing too. Ideally, you don't want all your characters to have the same speech pattern. That way monotony lies.
And, of course, Star Trek characters are never really going to speak some "believable" future dialect, because the shows are intended for contemporary audiences, who shouldn't have to struggle to decipher actual 24th-century English or whatever.
Personally, I prefer it when the dialogue is more colloquial than formal, but that's both a matter of taste and a balancing act. Too colloquial and some slang expressions will inevitably date the show ("In a pig's eye!"); too formal and the dialogue can sound stiff and stilted.
And, of course, some expressions are more durable than others. "Groovy, man!" did not age well. "Goddamnit, you son of a bitch!" is timeless.
consider how many idioms in our daily language come from Shakespeare and the King James Bible. Most of us don't go around constantly reading Collected Works or a 400 year old bible translation. I'd be eating my words if I said I did, but I'd be in a pickle or at least on a wild goose chase if I wasn't able to understand such phrases in the twinkling of an eye. It's a forgone conclusion that people can speak naturally and simply express themselves in such a way without having to fall on their faces. Neither rhyme nor reason may explain why so much of these terms come from such a specific time period, and not others. Perhaps there's no new thing under the sun.
I suspect in a similar way to that idioms from some other focused time period, say the beginnings of the TV/Atomic/Sci-Fi age might give us the same effect. So it goes. In the meantime, don't panic.
I suspect in a similar way to that idioms from some other focused time period, say the beginnings of the TV/Atomic/Sci-Fi age might give us the same effect. So it goes. In the meantime, don't panic.
Or how to make something instantly sound "futuristic" by adding a numeric prefix. Dilithium crystals, duotronic computers, tri-ox compound, quadrotriticale, tri-magnesite flares. (Magnesite is actually a mineral that's often dyed to imitate semiprecious stones.)
I'm 64, and I still use "groovy".
These days, though, I tend to use "shiny" more.
With Starfleet Academy only a few weeks away, we've all gotta brush up on our dodgy Academy lingo:
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