Thanks to my friend Debbie S., for sending along this tweet.
“Pooh?” said Piglet.
“Yes, Piglet?” said Pooh.
“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” said Piglet.
“Shaka, when the walls fell,” said Pooh.— Michael G. Munz (@TheWriteMunz) November 17, 2015
It made me laugh and reminded me that I had never posted this Atlantic article. One of my favorite episodes across the entire STU.
In the Star Trek universe, a “universal translator” automatically interprets between any alien language instantly and fluently. Unlike today’s machine translation methods, the universal translator requires no previous experience with another language in order to make sense of it. Such is the case with Tamarian, at least on the surface, as the Enterprise crew is able to comprehend the basic syntax and semantics of Tamarian utterances. “The Tamarian seems to be stating the proper names of individuals and locations,” offers Data, stating the obvious. But Picard quickly sums up the problem, “Yes, but what does it all mean?”
CALL ME MAGGIE 