Episode 236 - TNG - Darmok

Rachel Watches Star Trek

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Some comments from our Patreon supporters:

Ruth Dunmire - It's not, strictly, a metaphor, but "Beam me up, Scotty" is a phrase that tells a story that everyone understands--at least in Western culture. Even my 98-year-old mum knew what that means.

Peter Larsen - An author I follow has a son with autism who communicates almost entirely via song lyrics and dialogue from TV. He can make his needs known, but only because his parents have spent his entire life learning the context of the quotes. So there are people out there who communicate like this, but it doesn't work very well for a society where people might assign different meanings to the same phrase.

Jake Wilson - It's impossible for us to infer the complexity of their language, just as it is for someone reading the Chinese/Japanese 'alphabet' to infer the meaning of the character for sun/light/masculinity/etc by looking at the brush strokes and figuring out what they depict. And impossible, without education, to know that placing it next to the character that represents the concept of harmonious natural balance creates a name that sounds nothing like the characters individually.