TNG s5e2 " Darmok"
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2026
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Appreciate the callback to my earlier work.
Someone translate, please!
From panel 2:
- Angrily demanding answers
- mission accomplished
- and the captain?
- perished
- understood
- there was a creature that killed him
- acceptable, our business is concluded
- want his dagger back?
- nope
Newly pregnant couple, two lost in a hospital.
Picard, Riker, and Worf, their palms covering their faces.
Never Gonna give you up. Never Gonna let you down.
My god look at those swell moves
Love the username!
There are 4 gifs!
Homer, thinking of potato chips.
When the walls fell
Once again, the langue makes no sense. Unless it evolved from regular speech patterns other species have. Because it would require children to have been born with knowledge they shouldn’t understand to begin speaking the language properly.
The knowledge base has to be shared, yes. It's aggravating, but we can let it go for the sake of the memes.
Stephenson goes for a more believable version of this concept in Diamond Age. The most common written language is pictograms, with a minority being able to read words. I suppose we could imagine the people then going from this stage to speaking the sounds associated with an image without understanding that the sounds form words with individual meaning.
https://imgur.com/picard-visits-gif-subreddit-c2meXJO
Classic from /r/highqualitygifs
Amazing
Wondrous.
From 2 years back.
Data with Tasha: his fly open.
I think the Tamarians must have a second, more literal language to describe the events the metaphors are about, because you don't understand a metaphor unless you know the story behind it. For example, saying some event is someone's Waterloo only makes sense if you know Waterloo was the site of Napoleon's final defeat. To know "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is about working together, you have to know that they worked together.
Not sure i entirely agree, i think you could conceivably teach someone the meaning of a saying without conveying its origin, through sheer repetition in context.
Isn't that how we came up with language in the first place? Point at a stone and make one specific grunting noise. Grugzug, your fellow caveman, will eventually connect the two if you keep doing it
And i also just thought of the fact that we have plenty of sayings in everyday use, that the people using them can rarely place in their correct historical context. Take Romeo and Juliet, to this day people think of romance first and foremost. And not fucked up teenage suicide and silly blood feuds.
I concur. I am not a young person. And yet, I have an idea of what "rule" means in the title of a shitpost, and I shouldn't even know what "shitpost" means. I have never seen a formal definition for either of them. I don't think "rule" (in that context) even has a rigid definition yet. The meaning isn't just communicated by example; it is being invented by example.
I still feel like there has to be a really big turtle at the bottom who is not standing on another turtle. Words that mean things in themselves. But I've never been there.
The whole point was that they communicated through metaphor, which they aren't doing if they simply memorize the sounds. That would make "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" the literal words that mean "working together" like words in any language. To speak in metaphors they don't have to know the whole story, but they at least have to know it's a reference to two people working together.
The Tamarian language is like C++ whilst normal language is binary, or assembly. Sure, all C++ is based on assembly and assembly is based on binary, but once you've invented a higher-level language, you're not gonna have much patience for lower-level languages anymore; that's for the compiler to worry about. You might still use binary - or, more realistically, hexadecimal - for limited purposes like RGB codes, but outside of that it's all higher-level, baby.
We can learn C++ without without knowing binary because we have C++ documentation written in human languages. Likewise, the Tamarians need a non-metaphorical language to explain their metaphors.
They have it. "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" contains the words "and" and "at". Other phrases include words like "his", "eyes", "opened", "when", "the", "walls", "fell", "on", "ocean", etc. That's the binary. What's interesting is that they seem incapable of understanding binary on its own anymore, and only know C++.
Indeed, they would require a base knowledge and more straightforward means to initially communicate.
I've actually started doing this to cut down on my use of swearing. Having to take a moment to think of an appropriate metaphor for the company I'm in and not blurt out a convenient "FUCK" helps me not get so stressed about the little things that go wrong.
