We never actually hear the story of what Temba generously gave up and to whom he gave it but we know "Temba, his arms wide" is "generosity" And we can probably infer there's a little more nuance to it than just the word "generosity" or saying "You should be generous"
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It's some kind of story where instead of demanding what was his by right Temba sacrificed to make sure everyone got what they needed and by so doing averted disaster for everyone including himself The alien captain uses it to argue for giving the Enterprise another chance
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I mean even before we called it memes we already had plenty of stories that work this way, much like Picard uses the epic of Gilgamesh as one of his tales. The difference was that the aliens communicate exclusively through them which is why the translator failed.
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(or at least seemed to fail, it did translate regular words just fine but without the pool of references of names and the stories they represent it made no sense to the crew)
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What I always wondered was how the aliens learned those stories in the first place, if they spoke only in references to them.
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I did, too. It just now occurred to me, maybe visually, like with mime or silent film?
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arthur chu, posting
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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This Atlantic article has a really interesting analysis of the episode https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/06/star-trek-tng-and-the-limits-of-language-shaka-when-the-walls-fell/372107/ … Key is that they only *seem* to be "speaking in metaphor", but what's actually going on is stranger and more fundamental — a kind of "logic" akin to how video games simulate things.
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Ha ha, yes, Bogost takes the same approach that the guy who wrote that play did The Tamarians aren't "poetic" or "religious" or whatever, they're *efficient* A meme or an allusion is like a program calling a function from a library, in both cases a "reference"
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