percus@acf4.UUCP (Allon G. Percus) (07/15/85)
An interesting point was raised in a recent mail message to me concerning
the name TARDIS (you don't mind if I tell 'em, do you Paul?). The
question is, shouldn't only the Doctor's time capsule be called
a TARDIS, seeing as Susan made up the name. Isn't it rather strange
that, in "The Deadly Assassin" for example, the Time Lords are talking
about the Doctor's old Type 40, using the word "TARDIS"?
The answer, I think, is that it is not surprising. In "Masque of
Mandragora," the Doctor answers Sarah's suspicious question about
why she understands Medieval Italian in the following terms:
One of the "fringe benefits" of being a Time Lords is that the
language barrier is overridden. Furthermore, the Doctor can
"lend" this gift to anyone who travels in the TARDIS with him.
Since we (the viewers) can almost always understand what people
are saying in the show (barring Venutian lullabies in "Curse of
Peladon," etc...), we hear things language-wise from the Doctor's
point of view, so we would interpret the Time Lord's word describing
a time capsule as "TARDIS."
Of course, there are many counterexamples -- ideas which are shown
to the viewer as having different words in different civilizations
(I can't think of any offhand...), but they probably exist just to
make stories more interesting, and not for the sake of continuity
from story to story.
A. G. Percus
(ARPA) percus@acf4
(NYU) percus.acf4
(UUCP) ...!ihnp4!cmcl2!acf4!percus
"I look forward to having seen you"
[Don't try to name the episode --
the Doctor never said it, but it
sounds like a Time-Lordish quote]