On 12/15/2014 12:55 PM, [email protected] wrote:
At the next qep’a’, we decided that it was a good story to tell Marc
Okrand. He loves a good joke. We told him and he laughed and we
laughed and then we were done laughing and it got quiet, and he
smiled, and he said, “Of course, you know that there really IS a
Klingon word for ‘armpit’, right?”
Eyebrows went up around the room. Everyone leaned in. People grabbed
their pens and pads or their Palm Pilots and styluses. When he felt
that he truly had everyone’s devout attention, he uttered, “{‘I’}”
I remember the revelation slightly differently. Mark Shoulson was telling Marc Okrand the story of {'I'}, with a majority of the attendees sitting on the floor in a circle around Marc. At the end of the story Marc was a little confused, not quite having followed all of it. He asked, almost as an aside, "What IS the word for 'armpit'?" thinking he'd forgotten and this would clear up his confusion.
Now, this was the first qep'a' that Marc attended in person, and he was still a little shy about it. We were all warned to be careful and not to pester Marc for words or other answers to questions about the language, so we'd all been bottling up these things. So when he asked what the word for armpit really was, we all burst out, "Yes, what IS the word for 'armpit'?" We were all grinning, only half-serious, but thinking maybe we'd finally get a word out of him, so we all got quiet and waited for his answer.
He realized what was going on and, with a completely straight face, said simply, "{'I'}"
Pandemonium, as lojmIt tI'wI' nuv rightly called it, ensued.When KLINGON FOR THE GALACTIC TRAVELER was published, the very first thing I did when I got my copy was look up {'I'} in the word list, and I was thrilled to see it there.
-- SuStel http://www.trimboli.name/ _______________________________________________ Tlhingan-hol mailing list [email protected] http://mail.kli.org/mailman/listinfo/tlhingan-hol