BW Media Spotlight

Like I mentioned last time, knowing the terminology of your world is important, especially if there are a bunch of writers who need to keep a coherent and continuous reality between them. Science fiction and fantasy has more rules to worry about than a lot of other genres because the audience needs to believe it’s a reality that could exist with a few alterations from our own rules here in the “real world”. (I’m not convinced the butterfly isn’t having a nightmare.) Your technobabble, magic systems, and whatever are important to make the unrealistic believable. Comedy can change a rule if it’s funny, but you still have to know which rules to break before it becomes obvious you care about events rather than stories.

In part one of this look into the…eight pages? And I only got through a page and a half last time? This is going to be a few parts. The point of going over this is to see officially what words had been used to describe what, and how that’s changed or remained the same not only in the last two seasons of this version of Star Trek but the shows and movies that would follow. Does what it mean here match up to how we’ve come to use it? Granted I have little exposure to the current “Prime” timeline because I don’t have Paramount Plus and when CBS did show Discovery I found it devoid of much of what sets a Star Trek show apart from any show about traveling around space or matching that world, and most of what’s come out since seems to have the same issue in tone or presentation. However when I did Next Generation‘s writer’s guide I needed four parts to go over terminology/technobabble.

Always remember, the geekier/nerdier your intended audience. There’s some truth to that old Saturday Night Live sketch of Trekkies asking William Shatner what he thought Kirk’s favorite breakfast is. When we use call something a boat, a television, an apple, those are words used to describe things. Calling them something else without being silly or speaking a foreign language would confuse anyone. These are normal words to people living in the Star Trek timelines, and not using them right would be us calling a boat a submarine. Unless it actually is a submarine or can function as both you wouldn’t call it that, because we’ve all agreed to call the boat a boat and the submarine the submarine. Words mean things and that shared naming system for things they have that we don’t helps enforce that sense of believable fictional realities. The fact that we call teleporters “teleporters”, and Star Trek’s teleporters “transporters” while on Doctor Who they’re “transmats” shows the nature and importance of fake words seeming real by everyone agreeing to use those words unless the character specifically disagrees for whatever reason matters to the characters. With that, let’s check out the next batch of old Star Trek terms to see if they still hold up.

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