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"Bolt Guard statistical assessment: Powerful. Smart. Handsome. Bolt Guard intent: Smack-laying in a downward direction."
"Irrigation of the land with seawater desalinated by fusion power is ancient. It's called 'rain'."
— Michael McClary
A joke based on describing something mundane using such technical language that it takes the audience a while to work out what's being talked about.
Mostly limited to Speculative Fiction, where it can be seamlessly slotted into the standard Expospeak, but occasionally turns up in other genres, especially when the characters are meant to be especially intelligent or academic, such as lawyers scientists or doctors.
Sometimes used as a form of Unusual Euphemism or to facilitate an Oops I Did It Again plot where someone assumes the technical explanation refers to something much more serious than it really does.
Can be used to implement a Tomato Surprise, ("Their only weakness is dihydrogen monoxide!"), or serve as a MacGuffin as the hero engages in an Evidence Scavenger Hunt to work out what the Expospeak really means (For example, the hero is told that the Monster Of The Week is a "lycanthrope", and then has to spend the next few scenes doing research to discover that "lycanthrope" is another word for "werewolf"). This second variety is dangerous, as you often run the risk of making the hero look like a complete moron if the Expospeak isn't impenetrable enough.
The number one all time most common Expospeak Gag is, "He suggested that you perform an anatomically impossible act."
See also Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, Sophisticated As Hell, Layman's Terms, Blunt Metaphors Trauma, Narrative Profanity Filter, Call A Rabbit A Smeerp.
Examples
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Fan Works
Films — Animation
Films — Live Action
- Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home has Dr. McCoy bully his way past hospital guards by shouting that his patient had, "acute post-prandial upper-abdominal distension," which is to say, "cramps".
- In Back to the Future, Dr. Emmett Brown sees a poster for the school dance and tells Marty there's a "rhythmic ceremonial ritual" coming up.
- Howard the Duck features a pizza being described as "It's a circular Italian food object."
- The second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie involves The Professor (played by David Warner!) asking Michaelangelo to pass him that vial of something with a complicated name that this editor cannot recall. Quips Mikey, "I don't mean to criticize science, but wouldn't it be easier just to call it 'the pink one'?"
- Played with mystically as opposed to technically in Big Trouble in Little China:
Egg Shen: Black blood of the Earth!
Jack: You mean oil?
Egg Shen: I mean black blood of the Earth!
- The 1994 Shadow movie, set in the 1930s:
Roy Tam: I guess you could call it an implosive, explosive, sub-molecular device.
Lamont Cranston: Or... an Atomic Bomb.
Roy Tam Say, that's catchy.
- The 2009 Star Trek film gives us this gem:
Pike: Is the parking brake on?
Sulu: Uh, no sir. I'll figure it out.
(beat)
Spock: Have you disengaged the external inertial damper?
Sulu: (looks embarrassed as he disengages the external inertial damper) Ready for warp, sir.
- From Pirates of the Caribbean:
Elizabeth: Captain Barbossa, I am here to negotiate the cessation of hostilities against Port Royal.
Barbossa: There be a lot of long words in there, miss. We're naught but humble pirates. What is it that you want?
Elizabeth: I want you to leave and never come back.
Barbossa: I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your request.
Elizabeth: (blank stare)
Barbossa: Means "no".
- In the Bond movie Never Say Never Again, an aging 007 is prescribed a strict health regimen. When Moneypenny asks what his "mission" is, he says "I'm to eliminate all free radicals." Moneypenny looks concerned "Oh, do be careful."
- Played straight — brutally so — in 2001: A Space Odyssey. When Hal cuts off the life support for the three hibernating astronauts, an alarm goes off and a monitor flashes "Computer Malfunction" then "Life Support Critical". A systems status monitor shows the astronauts' bodily functions flatlining one by one (and in a subtle, disturbing note, the last function to go — "Central Nervous System", i.e., the brain — goes haywire for several seconds before flatlining, hinting that the astronauts' deaths were anything but painless). Finally, the alarm shuts off, and the monitor flashes the message "Life Functions Terminated."
Literature
- In Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel The Colour of Magic, the Earth counterpart of one of the characters is described as "a specialist in the breakaway oxidation phenomena of certain nuclear reactors" (i.e. uncontrolled fires in nuclear reactors). Terry Pratchett worked in a nuclear plant before he became a Famous Author.
- In later Discworld novels, Mr Slant of the Guild of Lawyers would often say things in the Old Language (i.e. Dog Latin) to give his interpretation of Ankh-Morpork's ad hoc legal system a veneer of legitimacy (for instance Acquiris Quodcumque Rapis, "You Get What You Grab").
- Leonard of Quirm has a strange habit of coming up with Clock Punk versions of familiar devices and giving them very densely verbose names.
- And let's not forget the description of Harga's menu in Mort:
"They don't go in for the fancy or exotic, but stick to conventional food like flightless bird embryos, minced organs in intestine skins, slices of hog flesh and burnt ground grass seeds dipped in animal fats; or, as it is known in their patois, egg, soss and bacon and a fried slice."
- In Sourcery, a magic carpet would fly to the command "down" due to "laminar and spatial arrangements", or, more simply, because it was put on the floor upside-down.
- Hank the Cowdog, the canine narrating John R. Erickson's series of the same name, is given to describing his sensory organs as though they were sophisticated machinery:
"... As I recall the scene, I was reclined on my gunny sack bad, hovering in the twilight zone between watchfulness and more or less complete oblivion. In other words, although my more critical faculties were pretty muchly in neutral, I continued to monitor all sounds and earatory data in the Ready Room of my mind."
- Pretty much everything in the disgustingly awful The Eye of Argon is described in the most unnecessarily complex and horrible wording. As an example, eyes are probably more often referred to as "[colour] orbs" and "organs of sight" than just "eyes".
- Not to mention the "keen auditory organs". I mean, auditory organs? They're called ears!
- Or the "red fluid of life"...
- Do you mean blood?
- He means red fluid of life!
- Let's not jump to conclusions now...
- As in other series which blur the line between fantasy and science fiction, Steven Brust includes coded references to modern things in the seemingly Renaissance-y Dragaera universe. In one memorable instance, there is a reference to characters eating "the house bread" with some kind of fish spread. In modern terms, this is bagels and lox cream cheese.
- Good Omens mocks this:
Tommy: Mom, if any throughput eventuates premising to interface with Sgt. Thomas A. Deisenburger telephonically, Mom, sir, this individual will be—
Mom: Sorry, Tommy?
Tommy: I said, if anyone calls, Mom, I’ll be down in the Big Field, with Pop and Chester and Ted.
- The Dresden Files has Harry describing a plant monster in narration as a "chlorofiend"... because he feels silly saying "plant monster". It doesn't work, as he eventually has to use "plant monster" when everyone else wonders what the hell a "chlorofiend" is.
Live Action TV
- Stargate SG-1 uses this pretty frequently, most notably whenever an alien talks about guns (because they're unique to earth; everyone else uses energy weapons). From the episode "Small Victories":
Teal'c: The replicators are impervious to Goa'uld technologies. They are however susceptible to human projectile weaponry.
Davis: *visible confusion*
Jack: Guns.
- In an episode of Roseanne, when Nancy introduces her new girlfriend, the following exchange occurs.
Nancy: This is Sharon. She's an erotic dance performance artist.
Sharon: I'm a stripper.
- Characters on The West Wing often use an Expospeak Gag to avoid mentioning politically unpopular things (like taxes).
- Star Trek Enterprise: "In a Mirror, Darkly". Hoshi translates a Tholian's protests as "Something about your maternal ancestor."
- In Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Data's Day", Data got a beautiful one in complaining that he "may be chasing an untamed ornithoid without cause."
- Let's not forget his "Ode to Spot".
- Also Data: "It may be necessary to ignite the midnight petroleum." (actually, Data does this constantly).
- Mystery Science Theater 3000 often had Dr. Forrester use made-up technical names for cruel but simple devices, such as "Hypno-Heliostatic Stasis" for "Padding".
- A large majority of the dialogue between Hacker and Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister consists of barely comprehensible expospeak, satirising the impenetrable workings of government.
- In the MacGyver episode "Last Stand", Mac is holding some piece of equipment that he's supposedly going to use to fix up a plane so the bad guys can escape. When asked by his guard what the item is, he replies "Lateral... cranial... impact... enhancer", and smacks the guard across the head with it.
- In another two-part episode, Mac puts together an ancient device explaining at length what it does, defining it as an "optic pump". When the Girl of the Week asks what an optic pump is, he says, "a laser".
- More infamously, The Man Show (which, admittedly, has few enough merits) managed to collect the signatures of over 1,000 women in a petition to "end Women's Suffrage" — which is to say, deny women the vote.
- A trope much beloved by Robert Holmes, the writer of more than a few Doctor Who serials, usually to illustrate pompous stupidity. In "Carnival of Monsters", for example, arrogant aristocrat Orum says of the low-ranking Functionaries "Give them a hygiene chamber and they'll store fossil fuel in it." This is an Expospeak Gag on a line from the early 20th century, reflecting conservative class attitudes "If the workers had baths, they'd use them to keep the coal."
- Inverted in Holmes' "The Deadly Assassin". Rather than describe the Doctor's change of body by the rather more lofty "regeneration", a fellow Time Lord refers to them as "face lifts".
- In "Four to Doosmday", Adric displays both his scientific knowledge and personal immaturity to irritatingly ask for the "sodium chloride", when he really means the salt.
- This troper didn't interpret it that way at all — it's possible that "sodium chloride" really is the most common name for it on Alzarius.
- This troper did, because he used to do the same thing. Fish'n'chips with sodium chloride and ethanoic acid.
- The same joke was later used in a Doctor Who spoof on Extras, where David Tennant's Doctor defeats a ridiculous slug-like creature by throwing "sodium chloride" at it after spouting off lines of obvious exospeak.
- Sent up in "The Girl in the Fireplace", where the Doctor admits that he said "spatio-temporal hyperlink" because he didn't want to say "magic door".
- This troper actually finds the Doctor's original term to make much more sense than "magic door".
- A non-Robert Holmes story, "The Idiot's Lantern", uses a Expospeak Gag.
Rose: That thing, is it trapped for good on video?
The Doctor: Hope so. But just to be on the safe side though, I'll use my unrivalled knowledge of trans-temporal extrapolation methods to neutralise the residual electronic pattern.
Rose: You'll what?
The Doctor: I'm gonna tape over it.
- "The localised condition of planetary atmospheric condensation caused a malfunction in the visual orientation circuits. Or to put it another way, we got lost in the fog."
- A variant occurs in Babylon 5: Garibaldi says nothing, but mind-reader Bester replies with "Anatomically impossible, Mr. Garibaldi, but you're welcome to try."
- In Living Color based a series of skits on this premise. Prisoners with big words can be dangerous
 .
- This quote from Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory: "I'm polymerized tree sap and you're an inorganic adhesive, so whatever verbal projectile you launch in my direction is reflected off of me, returns to its original projectory and adheres to you." For those getting a headache from that, it's the old "I'm rubber and you're glue" retort.
- That quote?? The whole show is this trope, Sheldon in particular. What's interesting is you often get two sets of canned laughter — one when the geeks in the audience get the Expo Speak and another a few seconds later after the Laymans Terms translation.
- Another favorite, when he tries to trash-talk his opponent in a robot competition: "I'm given to understand that your mother is overweight."
- Also, in the episode when Howard accidentally drives the Mars Lander into a ditch, Sheldon remarks, "I believe the appropriate metaphor here involves a river of excrement and a Native American water vessel without any means of propulsion", which was his way of saying "up *** creek without a paddle".
- In the Firefly episode "Out of Gas", River tries to explain to Simon why she forgot his birthday.
"'Day' is a vestigial mode of time measurement, based on solar cycles. It's not applicable. (long pause) ... I didn't get you anything."
- Mal in episode 2: "And I'm thinking you weren't burdened with an overabundance of schooling."
- Lost: Sawyer is afraid his headaches indicate a brain tumor. Jack informs him he has hyperopia, letting him believe for a moment that this is a dreadful disease, when it really means he's farsighted.
- Pretty much the entire point behind the Coneheads sketches on Saturday Night Live.
- Used a couple of times in Monty Python by Pepperpots (Pythoners dressed up as women). In one sketch with an exploding penguin on top of a TV, one Pepperpot said "Oh, intercourse the penguin!". In another, when one Pepperpot was proven wrong about something, she said "Coitus!". In both cases the Pepperpot was referring to the 4-letter "F word".
- Interestingly, "intercourse the penguin" wasn't in the script. John Cleese reacts with visible surprise and almost laughs.
- Quoth Insufferable Genius Frasier from Cheers: "I heard a line in one of those... tribal passages that I thought was the keynote for this evening: 'Everybody have fun tonight. Everybody Wang Chung tonight.'"
- Red Dwarf played this for laughes several times, most notably in "Stasis Leak".
Cat: (to Rimmer) What is it?
Rimmer: It's a rend in the space-time continuum.
Cat: (to Lister) What is it?
Lister: The stasis room freezes time, you know, makes time stand still. So whenever you have a leak, it must preserve whatever it's leaked into, and it's leaked into this room.
Cat: (to Rimmer) What is it?
Rimmer: It's singularity, a point in the universe where the normal laws of space and time don't apply.
Cat: (to Lister) What is it?
Lister: It's a hole back into the past.
Cat: Oh, a magic door! Well, why didn't you say?
- Inverted in Hogans Heroes:
Hogan:Newkirk, please tell Colonel Klink, without getting too technical, why his truck is being repaired."
Newkirk:Certainly, sir. It's broken."
- Better Off Ted: Veronica is late for a meeting because she was working on the "dough-based projectile ventilation targeting system". Translation: she was competing against Linda to see who could throw more bagels into the air vent.
Puppet Shows
- Link Hogthrob, in one episode of The Muppet Show's Pigs in Space, charges Miss Piggy with the important duty of utilizing the "independent heating-slash-unifying element" and the "horizontal equalizing plane". This wording is paramount in getting her to agree to ironing the laundry without her realizing it.
Music
Video Games
- The infamously difficult Adventure Game adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy features a puzzle where the player has to take a "buffered analgesic" (i.e. an aspirin tablet).
- Freedom Force Vs. The Third Reich
Mentor: There is a saying on Earth: "One engages in a contest with the group of cards granted to him by the dealer."
- GLaDOS frequently speaks in nothing but Expospeak in Portal. Examples: the Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device, the 1500 Megawatt Aperture Science Super-Colliding Super-Button, the Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator, the "victory candescence" in the final chamber, the Aperture Science Thing We Don't Know What It Does, and so forth.
- In Final Fantasy XII, when Balthier, Fran, and Vann get their equipment back in the Nalbina Dungeons, combining it with Added Alliterative Appeal:
Balthier: Ah! The prison repository of wrested relics and remnants.
Vann: So our stuff is in here?
Balthier: That's what I said.
- Presea from Tales of Symphonia does this occasionally.
Web Comics
- This xkcd comic.
- "Stay back! He's Fructivorous!" "Fructivorous," of course, means "able to ingest a common variety of sugar which is an essential part of the human diet," but the latter doesn't sound nearly as alarming.
- Vaarsuvius of The Order of the Stick tends to do this as part of his/her general Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness.
- Roy returned the favor once; it's how V came to respect him enough to work for him.
Roy: Or maybe I'm hiring you because I require the creation of a managed spherical energy release with a thermal signature no less than 1850° Kelvin, which can be manifested at specific X, Y and Z coordinates from verbal cues.
I require this precise temperature since it is the minimum level at which necrotized epidermis has been proven to combust...
And I have reasons to believe that my mission will require the incapacitation of multiple post-organic hostiles.
Vaarsuvius: So... you need Fireball spells to toast the undead you expect to fight?
Roy: Did I stutter?
- Irregular Podcast! annotations explain Australian slang:
crack on to — an attempt, usually by a male, to engage another person, usually a female, in conversation as a prelude to initiating manoeuvres aimed at the eventual amorous interaction of said second person by said first person.
Web Original
- In the lonelygirl15 episode "Mission Alpha", Spencer explains why he has never exercised before: "I actually can't because I have a condition called nociception, which can be exacerbated by a build-up of lactic acid." Nociception is the ability to feel pain, while lactic acid is generated in normal exercise and simply causes mild discomfort.
- The Bastard Operator from Hell sometimes uses this one or another way. For example, "Total Component Fatigue".
Western Animation
- Star Trek The Animated Series has a running gag of Spock doing this, and exchanges of this sort following:
McCoy: Why couldn't you have just said [x]? Spock: I believe I just did.
- The Simpsons uses this in the episode "Homer's Triple Bypass":
Hibbert: Homer, I'm afraid you'll have to undergo a coronary bypass operation.
Homer: Say it in English, Doc.
Hibbert: You're going to need open heart surgery.
Homer: Spare me your medical mumbo-jumbo.
Hibbert: We're going to cut you open and tinker with your ticker.
Homer: Could you dumb it down a shade?
- Dr. Orpheus from The Venture Brothers often talks this way, as when he makes reference to his daughter attending an "electronic music recital".
- Happens on occasion with Edd from Ed Edd N Eddy. A quote from the Christmas Special:
Edd: Ed! Eddy's pillaged Saint Nick's satchel of individual Yuletide bestowals! (gets a blank stare) The presents, Ed. Eddy's taken the presents!
- Although not the smartest of characters, Bloo pulls it off in the Fosters Home for Imaginary Friends episode "Adoptcalypse Now":
Bloo: Then it's time for drastic action, and I've got just the plan. Operation Abe Lincoln Drop Purple Scaredy Cat Run and Scramble. From the arboreal vantage point, we shall unleash the ultimate weapon, creating a devastating chain reaction the likes of which the galaxy has never known!
Mac: What?
Bloo: I drop this fake spider on Eduardo, he freaks out, and everyone runs away.
- In one episode of The Tick, Neil, a scientist, has managed to grow some dinosaur tissue in a lab, retarding its growth by keeping it in an acetylsalicylic acid solution. He accidentally eats the dinosaur tissue, and ends up turning into "Dinosaur Neil", a giant monster. Upon learning about the acetylsalicylic acid, Arthur figures out how to save the day and turn Dinosaur Neal back to normal: as he tells the audience, acetylsalicylic acid is aspirin.
- Used occasionally by Frylock in Aqua Teen Hunger Force when describing his latest invention or plan:
Shake: What is that, for vegetables?
Frylock: It translates brain synapses and neural skull vibrations into audio speech frequencies.
Shake: Yeah, I got one of them too. It's called a mouth.
- Used in Futurama's Anthology of Interest I:
Fry: Where am I, anyway?
Nichelle Nichols: You're travelling in a specially equipped terrestrial transport module.
Gary Gygax: A school bus!
Real Life
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