[geeks] Best ST:TNG episode...

[bill pointon]

hi all -- everyone is speaking about metaphors as being impossible or 
impractical to use in a language and using the example that saying duck 
is quicker or more efficient than saying billybob... --- however ---- 
duck is itself a metaphor --ie -- to put your head down like a duck 
feeding in a pond -- any language used by humans or any other 
intelligent creatures - as opposed to a robot or machine language - is 
going to be full of metaphor -- billp
On Thursday, February 14, 2002, at 06:38 , David Cantrell wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 01:10:58AM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
>>> The whole "speaking in metaphor" idea bugged me.  How did they
>>> develop the words they needed to speak that way
>
> Yeah, it seems rather inefficient too, not to mention being hard to 
> express
> new concepts.
>
>>>                                                 and how many
>>> people die each year because they can't just yell "DUCK!" instead
>>> of saying "when BillyBob lost hold of the rope holding up the
>>> piano"?
>> What do you mean?  Surely you know that the Universal Translator was
>> capable of finding matching words in arbitrary never-before-heard
>> languages.
>
> The point is that in the time it takes for ugly-alien-dude no 1 to shout
> "when billybob lost hold of the rope holding up the piano", 
> ugly-alien-dude
> no 2 has been shot by the sniper in the opposing side's trenches.  
> Whereas
> if you just shout "duck!" he has a chance.
>
>> When you think about it we do have many similar metaphor-based
>> expressions in common use now!  Even some based on Star Trek!  :-)
>
> I thought that Picard's reading Homer (I think) at the end of the
> episode was a nice touch.
>
> --
> David Cantrell | david at cantrell.org.uk | 
> http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
>
>    o/~ we wish you a merry currency and a happy new euro o/~
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