Actually, I need to check this. The first piece of information may have been in Berman’s short story as well, rather than in one of Gerrold’s books. (After thinking about it, I’m pretty sure it was.)
Wasn’t the first appearance of Klingons with brow ridges in Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, right at the beginning when their ship is destroyed by V’Ger? One of them was played by Mark Lenard, who also played Spock’s father and was the Romulan commander in Balance of Terror.
FWIW, I wouldn’t consider any of the first four words to be particularly common. “Zek”, while even less common, is also an English word, at least according to the OED. It defines it as a person confined in a Soviet prison or gulag.
The problem with that theory is that several Klingon characters who had appeared in ST:TOS (no ridges) appeared in [noparse]ST:DS9[/noparse] (with ridges).
After eliminating all the obvious straightforward explanations, they kludged together something about a genetic retrovirus in ST:E.
Loanword, anyway. I doubt you’ll ever see it outside of Solzhenitsyn.
So is “Rom”, not to mention two thirds of all other words in the English language.
That’s where you’re most likely to see it, though the OED also cites uses in The Guardian Weekly and in the works of crime novelist T. J. Binyon.
While the Cardassians appeared in Star Trek three years before Kim’s father, the lawyer Robert Kardashian, gained wider prominence with the O.J. Simpson trial, it seems such a distinctive name that I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a link - Kardashian was from California. Or, Kardashian being an Armenian surname, it could have come from some other non-famous Armenian or Armenian-American.
The name of the Cardassians also reminds me of the Circassians, a people from the Black Sea region, not too far from Armenia, who were mostly expelled from their homeland by the Russians in the 19th century and who subsequently took refuge in the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
You may be right. I remember the makeup was heavier, but I don’t recall cranial ridges specifically. I need to see the movie again.
“Kludge” is a very apt term.
My point exactly. They chose common surnames because they didn’t go to the trouble to use an uncommon one.
So not only are they unoriginal, they can’t spell either.
So? The planets were named that way. Still unoriginal. Why not, say Chaing and Eng? Viola and Sebastian? Again, they put the least amount of thought possible when coining the names.
Maybe, but can you confirm or deny the story that they named one group of aliens and planned to use them again, but chose a different name?
And they used “earthling” for “Charlie X”? The term was horribly dated in science fiction at that point; no one in the literature used it.
Yeah, but science fiction movies are often a decade or two behind the literature, and TV shows even further behind. We are lucky that they used “communicators” instead of “spaceographs”. 
In the literature for the Star Trek role-playing game (or maybe the Starfleet Battles wargame [I don’t remember–I browsed through a rulebook once, and never played either game.]), it was claimed that the Romulan names for their homeworlds were difficult for English-speakers to pronounce, and “Romulus” and “Remus” were approximations.
There was one blue-skinned alien (an Andorian maybe?) on *Enterprise *who liked to call the humans “pink-skins.” It was a recurring character played by Jeffery Combs.
Yep, that was an Andorrian.
It works great if most or all of the Humans such an alien interacts with are Caucasians, but sort of falls apart when said alien meets Humans of African descent. Then again, most Star Trek aliens, particularly Old Series, were remarkably uniform in appearance. It wasn’t until much later we saw racial variations in the major races. The one time in TOS we saw “racial variations” it was a plot anvil (“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”)
YMMV. I feel the average person knows the meaning of quark and brunt. There’s also nog, as in the popular holiday drink. And most people who are familiar with computers can define Rom as read-only memory.
I liked Worf’s answer in Trials and Tribble-ations: “We do not speak of it with outsiders.”
Yes. A joke by the writers, of course. The only non-absurd actual answer is that Klingons always had ridges.
Here’s the opening scene from the motion picture. The brow ridges are quite prominent on the Klingon characters.
Also, Kruge and the other Klingons had brow ridges in 1984’s The Search for Spock, which also predates TNG.
Nope. Never heard of this at all.
Watch the episode. McCoy uses it when he rejects the possibility of Charlie being an alien masquerading as a human. To the best of my recollection: “Not unless they’re exactly like Earthlings. The development of his digits exactly matches that of Man on Earth.”
Re Chekhov / Chekov, you might want to ask Tschaikovskii about that.
Chaikovskii is cognate with Chekhov? :dubious: