Building the Inner Persona: Galactic Idioms

As we’ve touched on before, one of the last stages (in Townsends’ model) of putting together a living history impression is the ongoing process of building the ‘inner persona’. This means going beyond the superficial ‘outer persona’ (one’s clothes and gear), and working to inhabit the mental headspace of your chosen individual – for our purposes, a citizen of the Galaxy Far, Far Away. While this level of detail is probably not necessary if you just want to be a GFFA reenactor, if you’re interested in using your impression as an historic interpreter—especially a first-person one—it can be very helpful to have at least a few in-universe sayings stashed away in your mental ‘word-hoard’. We may take such phrases for granted in our everyday life, but they can really help sell the illusion when speaking in-character!
We’ll begin with variations on familiar phrases from Earth.

for “bull in a china shop”: “A nerf in an antiquities bazaar” (I, Jedi, Chapter 6) Rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it? 😉

for “making a mountain out of a molehill: “making meters out of microns” (X-Wing: Rogue Squadron, Ch4)

for “wild goose chase”: “wild bantha chase” (Episode III)

“Strafing the spaceport you’ve just left” – Corellian saying (I, Jedi)
and the Caamasi equivalent: “Uprooting a plant after you have plucked a single blossom.” (ibid) This one’s hard to pin down but I think it’s something akin to ‘shoot yourself in the foot’?

“A credit for your thoughts” (Jedi Trial)

for “the deck is stacked against me”: “the Sabacc cards have been programmed against me” (The Krytos Trap)

for “right on the money”: “Right on the credits” (Rebel Dawn)

for “let sleeping dogs lie”: “Let sleeping Hutts snore” (I, Jedi, chapter 16)

for “put all your eggs in one basket”: “we have all our spice in one freighter” (The Krytos Trap) this one is stated to be a smuggler’s saying

“One Wook’s wine is a Pacithhip’s poison.” (Star Wars Gamer 9: Endor and the Moddell Sector)
I have to say, this one has really grown on me. It’s not a simple case of word-replacement like most of the others in this category, but by reversing the order and using alliteration, it manages to rework “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” into something that feels much more Galaxy-authentic.

“Three jumps from sober” (I Jedi, chapter 43)
This one’s great, too. Like ‘three sheets to the wind’, it expresses drunkenness by referring to the predominant method of long-distance travel (hyperspace jumps versus ship’s sails), but again, by not being a simple one-to-one replacement, it feels more authentic.

“…he didn’t have a flame’s chance on Hoth of hitting anything…” (X-Wing: Rogue Squadron, Ch16)
As I slowly read through the X-Wing series, Michael Stackpole is quickly becoming one of my favorite EU authors, in large part for his creativity in creating idioms that feel authentic to the universe. This is another one that takes an Earth phrase (‘a snowball’s chance in Hell’) and inverts it–putting a hot thing in a cold environment–while retaining the final ‘H’ sound. And I can attest from firsthand experience that when temperatures get down to the 0°F mark or lower, a fire really does struggle to stay lit!

for “How did you come to that conclusion?”: “How do you plot that course?” (Dark Tide I: Onslaught)

“Whenever the Force closes a hatch, it opens a viewport” (Revenge of the Sith, chapter 2)

“If it sounds like a bantha, walks like a bantha, and smells like a bantha, chances are it’s a bantha.” (Dark Forces: Soldier for the Empire)

for “needle in a haystack”: “…like searching for a quark in a mole of deuterium” (I, Jedi)

“When the only tool you have is a knife, the old joke went, every problem looks like a steak.” (Death Star, p108)

“When the only tool you have is a hydrospanner, every problem looks like something that needs to be torqued.” (I, Jedi, Epilogue)

for crazy: “he’s a few starships short of a fleet” (Galaxy of Fear); “Not firing on all thrusters” (NJO: Traitor)

for ‘eeny-meeny-miney-moe’: “Wonga winga cingee wooze, which of these do I choose” (The Hutt Gambit) This was a great discovery, and I can’t wait to use it the next time I do a workshop with a younger-skewing audience.

I’ll be rolling out some other categories of in-universe phrases in future posts…were there any good examples I’ve missed in this installment? Leave them in a comment below!

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