qep’a's. “I’m starstruck,” he said with a wide smile. “I brought a new copy of The Klingon Dictionary for him to sign.”
The second morning, when I greeted Scott by the coffee machine, he would only speak to me in Klingon, having taken the vow for that day. Luckily, someone had beamed me a PalmPilot dictionary at lunch the previous day, so I had the means to understand him in a painfully pause-filled kind of way. As the rest of the group came down from their rooms, he gained more game conversational partners and I gained some interpreters, the most skilled of whom was my guide, Mark, who through the rest of the weekend made it a point to keep me included with unobtrusive simultaneous translation in a low, gentle voice.
Mark’s translation was also for the benefit of Louise, another beginner who became my study partner. Louise, a French-Canadian ad copywriter in her late forties, had been to three previous qep’a's and had failed the first certification exam each time. She was going to try again. Unlike most of the other attendees, she didn’t seem to be into computers, games, science fiction, or even language. She went for a run every morning and then smoked a cigarette. She had short hair and tomboy clothes, but she traveled with a pile of stuffed animals, and when I saw them on the chair in her hotel room, all propped upright like a matinee audience, I asked her, a little embarrassed on her behalf, “Are they animals you’ve collected since your childhood?” “No,” she answered, not embarrassed in the least, “well, you might say my extended childhood.”
I still don’t fully understand why she wanted to learn Klingon, and I asked her more than a few times, trying to make sense of her response: “When I saw Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, I saw those boots, yeah? In the Klingon costume? And I said, ‘Wow! I want to make those boots.’ I thought maybe Japanese Klingon speakers would love to buy them. So I started to learn Klingon.” As far as I know, there are no Japanese Klingon speakers, but she didn’t seem worried about this. As for the boot-making part of her plan, she had apprenticed herself to a cobbler in Montreal.
Enigma though she was, Louise was relaxed and likable, and the only other person at the conference besides me who would have a drink at meals. We almost always sat next to each other, so Mark could translate for us and so we could study together.
And I was studying constantly, feverishly. Until I arrived at the qep’a', I thought I was done studying. I had scored perfectly on my postal-course lessons. I was confident, bigheaded even. After all, I was a linguist (and we don’t get many opportunities to feel superior). I was already familiar with the grammatical concepts. I memorized the affixes and about forty words of core vocabulary. I leaned back and crossed my arms over my puffed-up chest.
The language has a lexicon of about three thousand words, and there’s no way anyone knows all of them without peeking, or so I thought. The words are totally arbitrary and must simply be memorized one by one. You don’t get any help from cognates (for example, German Milch for English “milk”) or international words (for example, informazione), and you must deal with words for such things as dilithium crystal (cha’pujqut) and transporter ionizer unit (jolvoy'). How could anyone be expected to remember all of them? I assumed that for the first test, the smattering of words in the postal-course exercises would be sufficient.
Soon after I arrived in Phoenix, I found out that the first test was “beginner’s” level because you were expected to know “only 500 words.” I frantically made five hundred flash cards on tiny slips of paper, and carried them around with me to every activity and every meal, cramming and cramming.
If you have a sharp eye and an active imagination, Okrand does offer a narrow foothold into the lexicon. The word for “fish,” for example, is ghotI'. If you get the reference to the George Bernard Shaw anecdote about the absurdity of English spelling (“gh” as in “tough,” “o” as in “women,” “ti” as in “nation” = “fish”), you remember this word. The word for “guitar” is leSpal (parsed Les Paul). Other associations are simpler, but just as memorable. The word for “pain” is oy. “Hangover” is 'uH. This wink-wink tendency in the vocabulary, however, is no more than a faint undercurrent and can’t be relied upon as a study aid.
Unless, like me, you never met a mnemonic you didn’t like. In order to memorize five hundred words in three days, I spun my mind into a frenzy of associative madness: waq—“shoe,” shoes are for walking; Qob—“danger,” cobras are dangerous; wIgh —“genius,” Einstein’s hair looked like a wig; rur—“resemble,” the first letter resembles the last letter; ngeD—“easy,” ironic because “ng” and “D” are some of the harder sounds to pronounce. But careful not to get it mixed up with Qatlh—“difficult” (not ironic) because “Q” and “tlh” are the most difficult to pronounce.
Flip, flip, flip. The flash cards flashed. In my room at night, while everyone else hung out at the pool, I sorted them into piles of ten, only moving on to the next pile when I had one fully memorized. In the lobby, after the sing-along and before Klingon Pictionary, I had people quiz me. At the Old Spaghetti Factory, while we waited for a table for eighteen, I badgered Louise, who, frankly, didn’t seem to be studying hard enough, into reciting my intra-Klingon word associations with me (“wIv, tIv, yIv”—“choose, enjoy, chew”—I choose to enjoy to chew).
By the afternoon of the test, I was feeling burned-out. My head was swimming with what were essentially useless nonsense words. And some of the Klingons were getting on my nerves. Did they have to be so weird? Did they have to be so weird in public’? At a small Thai restaurant that we practically took over during the lunch rush, I shrank in my seat as an exceptionally polite waitress patiently guessed at what my costumed tablemates were pointing to when they insisted on giving their orders in Klingon. I wanted to meet her gaze and apologize with my eyes, but she was too rattled by the experience to look my way. Later, as the group made its rubber-foreheaded, vinyl-gloved, wool-caped, guttural-Klingon-speaking way toward the door (with me ineffectively hiding behind my hair), I saw a table of cute teenage girls mouthing a silent chorus of “Oh … my … God!” I have to say, it stung.
Marc Okrand didn’t make it to the qep’d that year. Scott wouldn’t get his dictionary signed. But the greater disappointment was that no new words would be handed down. At previous qep’a's Okrand had come through with new vocabulary. Some words he created in response to lists of requests. (“You can’t ask for anything impolite,” my guide, Mark Shoulson, told me, “but one year we did get the word for ‘snot.’”) Others were created on the spot—one year during the Klingon “Hokey Pokey,” when it came to Okrand’s turn, he said, “You put your Sa’Hut in …” Everyone stopped for a mental dictionary scan, thinking, “Do I know this word?” Finally they looked to Okrand, and he turned and stuck his backside in. And that’s how Klingon got the word for “tush” (Sa’Hut, incidentally, is tuchis backward).
Klingonists are strict about language authority. They have been especially strict since the early 1990s, when arguments about the KLI’s translation projects for Hamlet (since completed) and the Bible (still ongoing) led to the formation of a splinter group called the ILS (Interstellar Language School, no longer active). No one but Okrand can introduce new vocabulary. And no dispute about grammar or usage is considered settled until Okrand has spoken. He handles this responsibility cleverly, especially in light of the fact that he himself is not a very good speaker of his own language. The conceit he uses is that he has sole access to a native Klingon speaker, a prisoner named Maltz (and let’s just be clear that everyone realizes it’s a conceit). When questions arise about the correct way to tell time in Klingon, or the proper use of prefixes to indicate indirect objects, Okrand can claim that the matter requires further research. Sometimes he will publish an answer (on Internet newsgroups or in the journal HolQeD), but he has the luxury of waiting to do so until the expert Klingonists have fully debated the possibilities. “I have to be careful what I say, because if I make a mistake it will be noticed,” Okrand told me. He made a big mistake when for the instructional audiotape Power Klingon (published by Simon & Schuster), he put the subject before, rather than after, the verb in the toast “May your blood scream” ('IwlIj jachjaj—“blood-your scream-may-it”). He later explained that in the formalized domain of toast giving, the word-order rule is object-subject-verb rather than object-verb-subject. This modification rings true; it is often the case that ceremonial domains bend the rules in natural languages. (When but in toasts do we begin English sentences with “May your …”?) Okrand is a skilled back-fitter.
Part of what allows him to deal with accidental inconsistencies in such a natural way is that a realistic amount of wiggle room was built into the language from the beginning. In the introduction to the first edition of his dictionary, he discusses some “dialect differences” in Klingon vocabulary and pronunciation. (The notion of dialect
