[tlhIngan Hol] qep'a' cha'maH wej mu' chu' - New Words

[nIqolay Q]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2016 at 8:36 AM, Rhona Fenwick <qeslagh at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> Again, you're running into an issue of sense there. {tap} probably can be
> used for "crush", but only in the sense of crushing garlic cloves, or
> grapes for wine, or stones for mineral pigment, or that sort of thing. To
> "crush" one's enemies is an idiom in English: it doesn't mean you literally
> take your enemies and physically squash them between two objects, it means
> you rout them, you conquer them resoundingly, you {jeychu'} them. You may
> say "I crushed my enemy", and a Klingon may say {jaghwI' vItapta'}, but the
> likelihood is that they mean something different from what you do, and
> something far more gruesome.
>
Using "crush" (or other verbs of literal physical destruction) to mean
"thoroughly defeat" seems like a pretty straightforward metaphor. (Though
I'd be interested to know how many Earth languages use that kind of figure
of speech.)

Also according to boQwI', there's a canon citation for that meaning:
{yIntaH qIrq 'e' vIneH. DaSwIj bIngDaq latlhpu' vItap.} "Kirk I want alive.
The rest I will grind beneath my boot." (Star Trek Constellations p.232)

QeS 'utlh
>
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