[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: tarDIghaD

[Alan Anderson]

On Nov 4, 2019, at 11:06 AM, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius at gmx.de> wrote:
> 
> How ironically it was that at the time of that word's creation,
> everybody wondered about its necessity, and then two years later it was
> used hundred of times in the Klingon subtitles of DSC, where the
> tardigrade was an important element of the story.

It was a coincidence. Nothing more.

In 2014, the computer security company Kaspersky was looking for someone to translate a password analysis tool into Klingon. It estimated how long a brute-force “attack” would take to break a given password. Each short range of time had a comment relating it to things in everyday experience. As the times got longer, the comments got less ordinary. One was this:

“Tardigrade — the hardiest animal on the planet can exist in vacuum that long! It could crack your password while being there with a generic computer, and it’s your luck it doesn’t want to.”

That’s how the borrowed word, with its Klingon pronunciation/spelling of {tarDIghaD}, ended up in the lexicon.

— ghunchu'wI'