translatory fatigue

Eh, Uncle Greasegears bites his cornstraw and sez things like "The machine's'll be smellier, the gears will be embalmed with ever finer coatings of the smelliest engine greases, the barbershop will still smell of liniment and linseed oil, and the old advertisments for racing cars'll feature famous cinema stars and whatnot."

I don't actually have an Uncle Greasegears, but he'd swear by bourbon and bubblegum and the blitz, had I had one. And maybe the GI programme, and a whole smorgasbord of cultural sempiphemeralia which...

seems self-dating, assign-thine-eyes-to-the-prosaic, of yellowed plastic Bakelite and tupperware parties and this wheezing ugly contrail of human drama and nonimmediacy with the transcendent which stretches back (10y? 20y? 30Mya?).

 I got hatched on The Mechanical Universe and TVO's Photosynthesis and cellular respiration, and Tomes and Talismans, and Read All About It, Attenborough's Life on Earth, Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines, James Burke's Connections, many old Nova programmes, the Horizon Mathematical Mystery Tour, John Baez's This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics, Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, and GEB, various books by Rudy Rucker, and so on... in aggregate, it amounts to thinking in the whirly clefs of an frothy alien language written over the topologies and biology of a iridescent sea.

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Convincing Uncle Greasegears that, ngojhsfdgokkjt, there's a culture associated with those swirls and biomes, produces translatory fatigue,  because a constellation of memes glossed in "vortex shedding, mantis shrimp, hyperboloid", translates into paragraphs of barbershops and auto engines and congested and fragile trope-structures so ornately ossified that they're crinkling under their own weight.