… referring to any of the Empire’s citizen-shareholders, is valmiríän in the original Eldraeic; curiously, it is not cognate at all to that nation’s formal name. From its roots, it could have the meaning either of “ordered self” or of “self that sets in order”. When asked if one translation or the other comes closer to the intended meaning, the valmiríän, infuriatingly, always answer “Yes.”
— The Great Powers and Their People, University of Eö Press, 7387
“Phoenix Zero, you are blue-lighted across the board and launch commit. The clock is running. Good luck.”
And then the sky was bright with nuclear fire.
…for later reloading in the event of accidental death. Backups maintained at 283 separate locations throughout the Associated Worlds. Absolute confidentiality assured. Call today on 1-800-NOT-DEAD.
If someone had run the linguistic corpus from the first scout probe, the one that it had derived from the planetary data network, past some competent sophont linguists, they might have pointed out the problem.
Alas, such are scarce in the far reaches of space, and so the contact probe turned its antenna towards the planet and transmitted:
HOW ARE YOU GENTLEMEN. CEILING PROBE IS WATCHING YOU CULTURE. I CAN HAZ DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS? KTHX. OM NOM NOM.
“Whatever you may do at home, do not, under any circumstances, kneel. It is an insult that will kill you. Also, don’t bow any deeper than forty-five degrees, stand up straight while you talk, do look your interlocutor in the eye, even if it’s the Empress Herself, and while you ought to keep it to a respectful and formal register, speak straight out without stopping to grovel every couple of sentences.”
“And when I say ‘formal register’, I mean to say that there is no formal-register equivalent of ‘motherfucker’.”