Klingon: The Final Frontier

Rich Yampell, a software engineer in Stoughton, Massachusetts, was at a party recently in Washington State, and the conversation was just great. "The Klingon speakers were all at one end of the table," he reports, "and nobody else could understand a word we were saying."

Klingon? That's right, Klingon -- the alien tongue spoken in Star Trek movies and TV shows by bellicose fellows with the permanently furrowed brows. It sounds a bit like Japanese, a bit like Yiddish, with a lot of choking sounds and rough, saliva-spraying sibilants. (A handkerchief is recommended for novice speakers.) The idiom of a warrior...