You Know You're a Trekkie When...

[enterprikayak]

an arm.....? I'm starting to think it's got to be a back...and a vast one at that.

[Linda]

You know you are a trekkie when your daughter says to her daughter "Yeah, Grandma is all spaced out again".

[Asso]

OOOPS!

[enterprikayak]

Grandma *is* all spaced out! That's awesome!

[Linda]

Yeah, that and the phrase "space cadet" accompanied by a rolling of the eyes, LOL.

[Distracted]

My daughter's favorite epithet is "Trekkienerd". All one word.

I even have a reputation on the physicians' website where I post and comment for being a Star Trek fan (one too many SERMO Science Fiction Book Club threads, I guess). I go by my real name on that site, and on a recent thread some nOObie made a comment about Star Trek, and another one of the over 30,000 docs on the site (none of whom I have ever met) asked the poster if he knew me! By name! I guess I'm SERMO's token Trekker.

[JadziaKathryn]

Well, here's a new one. Not quite as glamorous as Distracted being famous, but here goes:

...when you think of your chilly room, "It's as cold as Andoria in here!"

[evcake]

Hot as Vulcan...

[evcake]

[Alelou]

...you love this op-ed piece from the New York Times not just because it makes excellent sense but because it quotes Captain Kirk:

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling.

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”

The article goes on to explain that this myth arose from an unfortunate analogy taken from Latin, in which such a split construction is impossible because only one word is used anyway. If you want to read the whole thing, it's here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/opini ... ss&emc=rss

[Asso]

That's very interesting. Actually the position of verbal particles has great importance in order to give and to pick up the exact meaning of a sentence or of a whole talk. And that takes me at this question: which the better way to transpose in the written language the inflexions' meaning?

[Alelou]

If I understand what you are saying correctly, I think it may affect the meaning more in Italian than it does in English -- in this case, with English, it's more the matter of whether it sounds good. The variations on Captain Kirk and Dolly Parton there mean exactly the same thing. The verb itself doesn't change, and the adverb still modifies the verb in exactly the same way. It's just a matter of what sounds more natural to the ear.

[Asso]

I understand. Well, under this point of view, Italian language is more complicated, I think.

[evcake]

[Alelou]

Looks good to me!