Thought you needed a blanket for smoke signals..
Spoilers Star Trek: Picard 1x02 - "Maps and Legends"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
- Start date
Thought you needed a blanket for smoke signals..
Don't forget: "Walking Freezer unit..."
Yay, Brother.
We don't want this thread to jump the shark.
#Ayyyyyyyyyyy
#Ayyyyyyyyyyy
I remember it only a couple times in films. I'm still not into it but we can have certain cuss words last for a couple hundred more years.
On the subject of anachronistic turns of phrases versus hokey-sounding future equivalents, I actually wrestled with this a while back. What was better: "she said, adding her two cents" or "she said, adding her two credits"?
The former is arguably anachronistic, but the latter seemed to call attention to itself in a distracting way.
In end, I went with "two cents" because it felt more natural. "Two credits" sounded kinda silly.
In the case of PICARD, would it have really worked better to have him say something like "Don't terminate this call"? That sounds clunky to me, not to mention self-consciously sci-fi.
The former is arguably anachronistic, but the latter seemed to call attention to itself in a distracting way.
In end, I went with "two cents" because it felt more natural. "Two credits" sounded kinda silly.
In the case of PICARD, would it have really worked better to have him say something like "Don't terminate this call"? That sounds clunky to me, not to mention self-consciously sci-fi.
Last edited:
Different idiom. Same "problem".
i always equaled one credit with one $/€/£. so there should be credit cents.
just my 2 €-cents
We still talk about people "taking the reins" of something, although some folks get "reins" mixed up with "reigns," possibly because they're unfamiliar with the source of the expression. I'd cite other examples, but I think I'm running out of steam . . .
As long as they avoid the horrible, fakey-fakey trope of explaining complex techno-babble via ridiculously antiquated metaphors that the characters would have zero real-life experience with.
"did the Romulans eradicate every trace that Dahj was here?"
"Well, they tried. But it's like someone recorded over your favorite mixtape. Sometimes, you can still faintly hear the original song in the background."
If you're dealing with an omniscient third-person narrator, I think it's 100% right to use contemporary figures of speech. Really it's only if your narrator is a fictional and/or historical person themselves that you need to watch this.
My own personal feeling regarding Trek has always been that its a dramatic depiction of what happens in the Trekverse, not a documentary. No one thinks the Universal Translator fixes mouth movements to match translated speech, or that the facial features of Tora Ziyal changed three times in DS9 with each recasting after all.
Last edited:
On a technical level, you're usually writing in third person, but from a specific character's POV, so it's somewhere between omniscient and first-person narration. That being the case, you do want to take into account the interior voice
of your POV character.
Personally, I'd use a phrase like "adding their two cents worth" when describing a scene from Kirk's or McCoy's POV, but would balk if the scene was being told from Spock's POV. That would be jarring, even if it wasn't literally dialogue issuing from his mouth.
Spock would be more exact as to the worth of his ideas.
That's why I live where I do. Bon fires are great community events and meet and greet with the neighbors.
Though, I don't think we call it a "smoke signal."
As to the use of anachronistic terms, "fuck" is probably among the oldest, dating back to the 16th century. So, some turns of phrase apparently never go out of style...
Similar threads
