I thought this video was absolutely fascinating throughout, even the ad.
The main thrust of it is about how natural Earth languages make use of idiom and metaphor frequently, and how Tamarian is subtly different from this. But we do also make use of a similar direct literary allusion, to different degrees in different languages. Mandarin has a number of examples, but we can also point to “crossing the Rubicon” as an example in English.
More recently, the use of memes has taken on a very Tamarian-like role.
There was an episode of The Magicians where Elliot and Margot used this to communicate while being spied upon. I immediately thought of this episode of Star Trek.
@Senex @Zagorath These are two of my very favorite episodes of anything!
I remember that. The Magicians was wild and I loved it.
The Magicians were one of those books where I hated most of the main characters but loved the series. The TV series was great even though they deviated from the books.
I haven’t seen The Magicians, but I remember something similar happening in one of the Austin Powers movies that make me think of this episode. Austin was talking to his dad in I think English slang. Without the subtitles if you are not culturally familiar with what they were saying it just sounded like nonsense