On Nov 4, 2019, at 11:06 AM, Lieven L. Litaer <levinius@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'