Allegorical speech

There was an episode from the 5th season of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (bonus geek points to any reader who identifies the name of the episode) where Captain Picard ends up stranded on a planet with an alien who communicates by saying apparently non-sensical things like "Darmok at Gerard."  Eventually, Picard figures out that this alien species communicates by referring to past stories.  To say that they need to cooperate, for example, the alien would refer to a past incident where two rivals put aside their differences to defeat a common enemy.

Of course, this doesn't work so well if you don't know the alien's mythology.

Anyway, I always thought this was kind of a silly episode; after all, who talks like that?  It's way too complicated.  But recently, when my baby son has had enough to eat, he's been saying, "Pooh stuck in Rabbit's doorway."  This is, of course, in reference to the scene in "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree" where Winnie-the-Pooh (a bear of very little brain) gorges on Rabbit's honey and then finds that he can't fit through the doorway -- only after he's already halfway through.

Then I started to realize that allegorical speech would make things a lot more efficient.  Some obvious candidates: prisoner's dilemma and Tragedy of the Commons.

Then I remembered a passage from Dean Harold Koh's book, The National Security Constitution, in which he describes how government lawyers referred to United States  v. Curtiss-Wright Corp. as the "Curtiss-Wright so I'm right cite," because of its apparent holding (but actually just dicta) that the President enjoys vast unfettered discretion in the realm of foreign affairs.

I wonder if it's possible to teach class like this . . . .

Comments

[Matt]

'Darmok' was the title of the episode.

[Jennifer]

The episode is called "Darmok." Yes, I'm a total geek.

[Lugosi]

"Darmok."
And the episode faked out a lot of people because for the first 15 minutes or so it seemed like a remake of the classic Trek episode "Arena."

[Taeyoung]

I recall reading that they borrowed the allusive approach from the Ascians who appear in Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun.