[tlhIngan Hol] Klingon Word of the Day: jva

[Steven Boozer]

Klingon Word of the Day for Monday, January 20, 2025

Klingon word: jva
Part of speech: noun
Definition: a stuck person (slang), ditherer (slang), confused prisoner (slang), mixed-up prisoner (slang)
Source: qepHom 2022
_______________________________________________

(Lieven, 11/23/2022):  For this qepHom, we had produced playing dice with Klingon words instead of numbers. And despite intense proofreading I somehow missed one typo, written in pIqaD:  it says {jva} instead of {jav}.  ... Now while preparing the qepHom and talking with Marc Okrand, I told him about this error, and I joked that perhaps Maltz has a good explanation for such a weird way of writing. Surprisingly, he did, and provided this nice story printed in the booklet. Ironically, nobody noticed the typo during the qepHom, or at least, they did not tell me.

(MO, qepHom 2022 booklet, p.23):  We know that the word {jav} is a slang expression for prisoner. Maltz said that this word is found in another slang expression: {jav mIS} literally "confused prisoner" or "mixed-up prisoner." 
    This is used to refer to somebody who's in a bind, in a situation they're not quite sure how to get out of. Maybe all of the choices are bad or the information available is conflicting. Maybe they don't know which way to turn and they keep changing their mind. But they can't do nothing. The situation is such that they need to make a choice. Maltz  said that's why the expression is about a prisoner: The person referred to by the expression is stuck, as if in prison, until a decision is made. ¶ One of  the situations in which this might come up is when playing a game and, as a result of something that happens during the game, a player has to decide what to do - and maybe it's not an easy decision. If they don't decide reasonably quickly, the other player(s) may become impatient and call the ditherer a jav mIS. 
    Somehow or other, some Klingons started using {jva} (in pIqaD, of course) as a way to write {jav mIS} - mixing up the letters of {jav} to create some kind of shorthand or abbreviation. (This is for writing only - one would pronounce written {jva} as {jav mIS}, not {jva}, whatever that might sound like.) Maltz says he's seen it in messages, but he's never seen it on a die. On the other hand, since a roll of the dice may put one in the position of a {jav mIS}, he thought "mixed-up six" was a good pun. Maybe your dice were manufactured for a game in which rolling a six always entails a tricky choice. 
    In any case, Maltz thought it was funny.

SEE ALSO:
ngutlh nagh  	die/dice with letters (n)

--
Voragh
Ca'Non Master of the Klingons