Language
While primarily English, the Colonial language was written to include several fictional words that differentiated its culture from those of Earth, most notably time units and expletives. The words were roughly equivalent to their English counterparts, and the minor technical differences in meaning were suggestive to the viewer. Colonial distance and time units were incompletely explained, but appear to have been primarily in a decimal format.
- Time units included millicenton (approximately equivalent to one second), centon (minute), centar (hour), cycle (day), secton (week), quatron (unknown, perhaps 1/4 yahren), sectar (month), yahren (Colonial year), centuron (Colonial century).
- Distance units were metron (meter) and micron (second of time when used in a countdown, but also a distance unit, possibly a kilometer.)
- Expletives included "frack", also spelled "frak" (interjection), "felgercarb" (noun), and "golmonging", also spelled "gall-monging" (adjective).
- Other terms included daggit (a dog-like animal indigenous to one of the colonies), ducat (ticket), pyramid (card game), triad (a full-contact ball and goal game similar to basketball), and lupus (a wolf-like animal indigenous to another of the colonies).
- Figures of speech There were a number of these used in the series, such as "daggit dribble", a term used to condemn falsehood, and "daggit-meat", used as an expression of contempt.
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Famous quotes containing the word language:
“For all symbols are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are, for homestead.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)