The Ice Spiders Killed Kennedy.

My brain-dump fic trying to explain why "kayfabe" is an Andorian loanword, from the perspective of a cultural historian:

(Sorry, tried to copy-paste from Word, and my formatting went EVERYWHERE.)

By hour five, the video has undergone the traditional conspiracy-documentary phase transition where the original thesis has ceased to matter.

It began:

KAYFABE: THE WORD THAT SHOULDN'T EXIST
A Linguistic Mystery from Before First Contact

From 0:00–0:40, it's excellent. Linguistic historians interviewed. The Andorian cognates are carefully reconstructed. Several proposed Terran etymologies are assessed and rejected for perfectly sober reasons. Carbon Creek is mentioned explicitly as proof only that pre-warp contact occurred, not evidence for Andorian contact.

At 1:53, the host discovers professional wrestling.

At 2:41, there is a chart.

"I'll be back in a second."

*Rough cut.*

At 3:17: “Again, I am not claiming Gorgeous George was Andorian.”

At 3:46: “There are, however, inconsistencies surrounding George Wagner's ears.”

At 4:12, somebody in the comments points out Spiders Georg.

Host searches it.

By 4:39, the chart has doubled in size.

“The popular account holds that Spiders Georg was an apocryphal cave-dwelling individual who consumed more than ten thousand "spiders" per year. But there is no contemporary documentation of such a persom... Just like there is no satisfactory Terran etymology for kayfabe.”

At 5:03 “What if ‘Gorgeous’ and ‘Spiders’ are not given names, but titles?”

At 5:21, Gorgeous George and Spiders Georg have become the same individual on the corkboard, despite the latter being a Tumblr statistical joke from the twenty-first century.

The linguists who appeared in the first forty minutes begin demanding that their interviews be removed.

And then.

THE GLIKAR'MA CONNEXION:

“Okay, folks. This is where things get weird.”

The host has found an obscure declassified Federation temporal-intelligence report mentioning that a Glikar'ma vessel passed within 0.7 light-years of Sol in 1963.

Glikar'ma are a non-sapient species? Ssssshhhh.

This is an entirely unremarkable distance astronomically. The Glikar'ma are nto even sapient. The host does not believe in astronomy anymore.

There is now a diagram:

KAYFABE
↓
GORGEOUS GEORGE = SPIDERS GEORG
↓
CARNIES
↓
CARNEY
↓
CARNE = MEAT
↓
GLIKAR'MA RITUAL CANNIBALISM???
↓
DALLAS

Andn then:

“I'm not saying the Glikar'ma killed Kennedy. I'm asking why nobody in Temporal Investigations will tell us they didn't.”

DTI releases a statement saying that the Glikar'ma did not kill President Kennedy.

Next week's video:

Thumbnail: Lucsly clarly mid-syllable, manipulated to look condescending

THEY'RE SCARED.

And the worst part is that buried somewhere around hour six is a genuinely fascinating fifteen-minute interview with an Andorian historical phonologist who has discovered a previously unattested 18th-century dialect form that materially constrains the development of kayfabe.

Nobody cites it.