To people who think TNG Darmok is unrealistic because the Tamarians would have lacked the ability to explain the very legends on which their language is based: nuh uh. You don’t have to understand a reference in order to use it. We do it all the time.

Tbh, everyone who makes criticisms like that about a piece of fiction are just doing the most shithead version imaginable of Carl Sagan's "If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe"

A better argument against the plausibility of Darmok, imho, is that a dialect consisting exclusively of metaphors wouldn’t have enabled the kind of technical communication needed by a spacefaring people. So maybe they had a written technical language, basically math+.

How many references over the years did the Simpsons reinsert into the consciousness with people not understanding them? Or weird once-contemporary gags by Looney Toons?