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On a recent "A Way With Words" program, a caller asked about the phrase "the die is cast", mentioning that he'd seen it as the title of an episode of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine". Grant and Martha did a splendid job of not only explaining the origin of the expression but discussing the caller's suggested derivations that weren't correct.
(The Star Trek people are pretty good at this sort of thing; I remember the "Next Generation" episode "The Inner Light", which title I immediately recognized as a reference to the Tao Te Ching chapter on knowing the whole world by observing just a small part of it. In that story, Captain Picard lived through an entire lifetime on another world while lying unconscious on the bridge of his ship.)
As luck would have it, I've just been working my way through the series "Stargate: SG-1" which I managed to miss when it was originally run, and came across an episode entitled "Chimera". In this episode, one of the regulars is visited in his dreams by an alien female agent trying to extract information from his subconscious. I wondered what they were trying to accomplish with the odd title, and watched the DVD again with the director's commentary, where they explained that a "chimera" was a demonic female spirit that preys upon men in their sleep.
That can't be right, I thought. Surely the word they were looking for was "succubus". A chimera is any creature (originally mythical but now also genetically-engineered) that combines two or more dissimilar species in one, such as the Sphinx (head of a woman, body of a lion). I do find some definitions of "chimera" that describe a fire-breathing female monster made up of unrelated body parts, but nothing about such a creature habitually attacking men in their dreams.
Ron Draney said:
The Star Trek people are pretty good at this sort of thing; I remember the "Next Generation" episode "The Inner Light", which title I immediately recognized as a reference to the Tao Te Ching chapter on knowing the whole world by observing just a small part of it. In that story, Captain Picard lived through an entire lifetime on another world while lying unconscious on the bridge of his ship.
That was an outstanding episode. Their writers were indeed some of the best. Blew me away when I learned Roddenberry had actually retained a professional linguist to develop an internally consistent, and intentionally guttural, language for the Klingon race. But I don't believe that happened until after the initial TV series back in the 60s. In that series the Klingons just wore bad makeup, spoke English, and snarled a lot.
By the way … totally agree regarding "chimera." At least that's the way I learned it in my mythology course way back when.
To fulfill the title of this thread someone should come up with another example. But off-hand none occur to me; Han Solo's famous gaffe about doing the Kessel run in 11 parsecs doesn't count, being a reference not literary but scientific. Maybe sci-fi authors are more literarily inclined than the usual run of screenplay writers.
Need another example? Well, it's not strictly sci-fi, and it's not really literary (classical's a maybe), but I remember when the three sisters on Charmed started talking about scrying as a way of searching for a person or artifact that had been hidden from them. Great, I thought, now we'll get to see them staring into a crystal ball for the information they seek.
Instead, someone apparently looked up scry in a dictionary, found a meaning something like "divination using crystals", and wrote a bunch of scenes where they hang a piece of broken glass from a string and dangle it over a map as a pendulum.
I avoid Charmed for the obvious reasons, but I am curious about "scrying". Is that relating to "descrying"? Lessee, here...Yeah, the OED says "1520s, 'to see images in a crystal, water, etc., which reveal the past or forebode the future;' aphetic of descry". What's "aphetic"? "Produced by aphesis." Great, onward to "aphesis": "the gradual disappearance of an initial (usually unstressed) vowel or syllable as in `squire' for `esquire' ". Thanks, Ron, I learned a new one—or two, actually. And yeah, I'd have to say this example is close enough at least to mention.
Martha Barnette
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