[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: ngaDmoHwI'

Ed Bailey bellerophon.modeler at gmail.com
Wed Nov 17 20:46:47 PST 2021


On Tuesday, November 16, 2021, Steven Boozer <sboozer at uchicago.edu> wrote:

> Klingon Word of the Day for Tuesday, November 16, 2021
>
> Klingon word:   ngaDmoHwI'
> Part of speech:         noun
> Definition:     stabilizer (component of a ship)
> _______________________________________________
>
>   qoD QutlhwI' ngaDmoHwI'
>   inner support stabilizer  (KBoP)
>
> This refers to those ceiling supports that look like huge shock-absorbers
> which flank the captain's chair on a Bird of Prey.
>
> TREKNOLOGY NOTES:
>
> I'm guessing that this is not the same thing as "inertial dampeners".  (Do
> we have words for "inertia" or "dampen" for that matter?)


>
You mean "damper," not "dampener." I think a good word to get the idea of
"damper" across would be vItlhHa'moHwI' "deintensifer."

I don't know for certain that Maltz hasn't given a word for inertia, but I
think chungbe'meH Qo would describe it adequately.

DaH may' bom pIm vIbom. The word ngaD, like jeD, has two glosses that are
physically distinct: "balanced" meaning the forces and moments acting on a
system cancel out, and "stable" that the system tends to return to a
balanced state. This always bugged me, but it makes sense if "be balanced"
is the basic idea of ngaD, and the word is also a short way to express "be
stable." If a Klingon scientist or engineer needs to be precise in
describing stability as opposed to balance, he could say something like
ngaD'eghbeHmoH "be ready to balance itself" or ngaDmeH Qo "tendency to be
balanced." And of course a balanced system doesn't have to be stable.
nItlhwIjDaq ngaDchugh Quj moQ, tugh pum ngaDbeHbe'taHmo'.

~mIp'av
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