Förmodligen den senare. Star Trek verkar gilla detta skämt; Chekov hävdade många saker som "uppfann i Ryssland". Spock attribut Sherlock Holmes citat och Richard Nixon citat till gamla vulkaner (även om Sherlock-saken kan vara verklig, antar jag, eftersom Spock också är halvmänniska), säger Quark uttrycket "diskretion är den bättre delen av valor "som ett Ferengi-ordspråk, och Khan säger" Hämnd är en skål som serveras kallast "är ett Klingon-ordstäv. Jag tror att det bara var en punkt på linjen av en löpande gag. (en löpande gagh?)
Intressant blev linjen ett problem vid skjutningen av Det oupptäckta landet , som Mark Okrand (som uppfann Klingonspråk) berättar :
There is one line of Shakespeare that is spoken in Klingon in the film, though it wasn’t part of the original script. That line is “To be or not to be.” When the film’s director, Nick Meyer, asked me to create a Klingon version of that, I said “okay,” but I thought “oh, no.” The problem was that there is no verb in Klingon that means “to be,” and I make a big deal about that in the book. I thought a bit and asked Nick if the line could mean “to live or not to live.” [But Christopher Plummer didn't like it, so] I thought some more, and suggested that taH replace yIn: taH pagh taHbe’. [...] The syllable taH, up until that moment, had been a suffix meaning “to continue doing” whatever the verb it was attached to was, so “eat” plus taH meant “to continue eating.” I sort of gave it a promotion to full verb status, but keeping the same meaning. So a new word meaning “to go on, to continue, to endure,” was created: “To continue or not to continue, to go on or not to go on.”