Some day I want to see a sci-fi production where the Nerd spouts twenty seconds of impenetrable technobabble, and the Salt-of-the-Earth Audience Identification Character is just like “well, shoot – it sounds obvious when you put it that way”, and proceeds with the plan without ever demanding a plain English explanation for the benefit of the audience.
(Over the course of the series it becomes a running gag that the
Audience Identification Character perfectly understands
technobabble, though they don’t speak it themselves. There are recurring
exchanges to the effect of “you know, the thingy with the bit on
top” “you mean the [something with an implausible number of syllables]?”
“exactly!”)
Okay yes but this is literally what trying to do science in a multilingual lab is like.
Nobody can FUCKING REMEMBER the english word for the machine so it gets called the “microbial tilt-o-hurl” or the “germ carousel” and then everyone looks at you because english is YOUR first language, remembering english vocabulary is your department, and you can’t do anything because you’ve been trying to explain the difference in english notation between fractions and ratios for half an hour and you just yell “it’s the one in the left corner that beeps!”
the reverse of the second thing was done in Thor 2 and it’s one of my fav things in any movie ever!
Actual conversation I’ve had:
“Go get me the thicc boi”
“You mean the Erlenmeyer flask?”
“No, the sexy one”
“Volumetric flask.”
“Yeah, that fucker.”
THE SEXY THICC BOI
The best part about this is when you have a household object you use for some obtuse laboratory purpose but your colleagues don’t know the English word for it so they use a technical description.
“Can you hand me the box with the static dischargers?”
