Genre Savvy: This is what the science of memetics (applied) will do for you. (And as has occurred to me more than a few times since starting this project, TV Tropes itself is a pretty good example of memetic research in action.) Since people do, by and large, do a lot of thinking in terms of semiotics and memetic analogies, there are entire disciplines of applied memetic training having to do with spotting the memes in play and leveraging them for personal advantage…
memes
HAPPY FUN PROBE
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.