Hating Bjorn?
OK I've searched the old Star Trek posts on the blog and haven't found this question addressed. Why is the super-villainous race (hive?) on Star Trek TNG named after a Swedish tennis great. I saw a boston.com headline today entitled "Borg Rekindles Memories"& I clicked expecting Trek trivia but it was about Bjorn coaching a Harvard tennis player.
Is it just a cool uber-Nordic sounding short word without too explicit a Nazi connotation or did TNG creators have a thing about the tennis player. Was it a comment on the cool & almost monotonous way he systematically destroyed his opponents (resistance often was futile).* I could search the net for the answer but I sort of like the discussion from the people who post here. Whats the story?
*I seem to recall the great matches between Borg and John McEnroe in the 70s (they were popular in our house) where I would route for Borg against the obnoxious, whiny, badly-coiffed McEnroe. My parents, particularly my mother, took great exception to routing against the American and thought that McEnroe for all his bluster represented us and the country. I responded that despite what the Europeans and others might think, being an asshole was not an American value.
Of course I lost the argument because you can't say "asshole" to your mom.
posted by New England Guy @ 5:31 AM
4 Comments:
You're missing the obvious: Borg is short for cyborg.
Well I guess "bot" was taken by then.
So the aliens spoke English- Kind of like the universal translator thingy in ST.
I'm sticking with the tennis angle
"So the aliens spoke English- Kind of like the universal translator thingy in ST"
I'm getting way too geeky about stuff I think is bullshit, but "Borg" is only the Anglo-centric universal translator ... uh... translation of their race name.
So yes, you are correct. In Star Trek, they use the universal translator thingy, just like in Star Trek.
But why does the universal translator produce twentieth-century English? Recall the crew's confusion between "the Son [of God]" and "the sun [in the sky]" in Bread and Circuses. Or even worse, recall that when Trelane spoke to the crew, they heard it in 17th century English, and when the Chicago gangster planet people spoke to the crew, they heard it in 1920s gangster slang: which meant that the crew actually failed to understand the meaning.
So the translator thing is nonsense. Occam's razor suggests that the galaxy is full of planets where everyone speaks English. We just need to accept the truth and move on.
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