Do you speak future?

[Santa Kang]

With Starfleet Academy only a few weeks away, we've all gotta brush up on our dodgy Academy lingo:

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Axanar, so very true.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Somehow, decades before, they knew

 

[Christopher]

With Starfleet Academy only a few weeks away, we've all gotta brush up on our dodgy Academy lingo:

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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."

 

[Q'OrnamentalDeqor]

Creating future slang makes me think of The Dark Knight Returns.

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.

 

[Q'OrnamentalDeqor]

Of course, if you could time-travel back 50 years and wrote a story then using actual slang from today, people then would find it equally stupid-sounding as the made-up stuff. I mean "My friend showed up with new drip, full of main character energy, saying the party was gonna slap — no cap — but honestly, his rizz was lowkey sus."

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?

 

[Christopher]

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.

 

[Greg Cox]

Well frak that!

I remain crushed that "frell" (from Farscape) never caught on the way frak did.

 

[Christopher]

I remain crushed that "frell" (from Farscape) never caught on the way frak did.

Yeah, it's such a load of felgercarb.

 

[XCV330]

gorram right - some rutting Firefly character, probably.