Ugh. This will be even an extension of our discussion in your Picard rewatch thread about swearing in Star Trek, but I found the "formal" dialogue of the BermaTrek era to be wooden and unengaging. After 24 seasons over 17 years the dialogue just started to sound artificial, especially compared to other "future" set shows. I agree with one poster here, and I wish I could remember who so I could give them credit, who said the characters in the BermaTrek era sounded like they "had sticks stuck so far up their asses they could be legally classified as plant life."
You'll note that I said "17 years" and "24 seasons". That's because in the first season of TNG, the stuffiness of the characters were still punctuated by an occasional bit of actual human dialogue. As I mentioned in the other thread, Gene Roddenberry had Picard stealth swearing in season 1, and this right here is hands down my absolute favorite Geordi moment in the entire franchise, also from season 1...
... because he sounded like a real, distinct and unique person among the crew. My head canon is that this really is who Geordi is and always was deep down, but getting promoted to chief engineer on the flagship with Captain Stuffyface led him to adopt a more formal veneer at work. When he's giving these briefings to the Captain and the senior staff in the Ready Room, outwardly he's Joe Professional. Inwardly, he's no different than Tilly, thinking to himself, "this is so f*cking cool."
So, yeah, I applaud the efforts to make the dialogue sound a little more realistic in the newer material. I want the characters to sound real, not like characters in a badly adapted Shakespearean play. If you were to say Gene Roddenberry never included dated and modern dialogue in TOS, I would say, "In a pig's eye" and "I bet you credits to Navy beans that you're wrong".
I'd go further beyond just that moment. Geordi in S1 was basically the wisecracking helmsman. That was his archetype before he had to become a department head. A proto-Tom Paris making snarky remarks every now and then. One episode even begins with him trying to tell Data a lame sex joke. Then they decided to make him the nerd that didn't know how to talk to girls.
