PAGES : A Little Something to Klingon To

Does it annoy you when someone slips in a Latin or French phrase to make a point and it’s Greek to you?

Well, fear not: Slip this into your next debate: “veQDuj’oH Dujll” (“Your ship is a garbage scow!”). A little Klingon stops ‘em every time.

Pocket Books has just released “The Klingon Dictionary,” an expanded version of the 1985 lexicon by Marc Okrand.

Becoming a Klingon expert was a fluke for Okrand, who works in Washington for the National Captioning Institute. He was at the right place (visiting a friend at Paramount Studios) at the right time (post-production on “Star Trek II”) with the right credentials (a doctorate in linguistics) when the professor lined up for a Vulcan/Klingon project bowed out.

“I actually needed someone to speak some Klingon, not just develop it cold for a book,” Okrand said. “So I went back to ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture.’ James Doohan (Scotty) created the original Klingon used in the film, so I used what he had done as a starting place.”

Those half-dozen lines were enough to begin yet another bestseller in the Star Trek publishing universe. More than 38 million copies of about a hundred original titles have been published--39 of which have had long runs on the New York Times bestseller list, according to Will Weisser of Pocket Books. And the new Klingon dictionary has gone through three printings in five months.

“majQa’ ” (Well done!)