#1 irritated
Leonard wants to travel back in time and prevent himself from buying a time machine. Sheldon points out the futility of his plan.
Transcript:
Sheldon: Leonard, it’s two in the morning.
Leonard: So?
Sheldon: So it’s my turn. Why did you set it for the day before yesterday?
Leonard: Because I want to go back and keep myself from getting a time machine.
Sheldon: You can’t. If you were to prevent yourself from buying it in the past, you would not have it available in the present to travel back and stop yourself from buying it, ergo you would still have it. This is a classic rookie time travel mistake.
Leonard: Can I go back and prevent you from explaining that to me?
Sheldon: Same paradox. If you were to travel back in time and, say, knock me unconscious, you would not then have the conversation that irritated you, motivating you to go back and knock me unconscious.
Leonard: What if I knocked you unconscious right now?
Sheldon: It won’t change the past.
Vocabulary:
futility = the fact of having no effect or of achieving nothing
ergo = therefore
rookie = a person who is new to an activity
to knock someone unconscious = to hit someone so that they become unconscious; You could also say to knock someone out.
unconscious = in the state of not being awake and not aware of things around you
irritated = annoyed or angered
(definitions taken from the Cambridge Dictionary)
#2 kind
Penny is in the shower and asks Leonard to do her a favor. Unfortunately, the favor is not what Leonard thought it would be.
Transcript:
Penny: Hey, Leonard?
Leonard: The hair products are Sheldon’s.
Penny: Okay, um, can I ask you a favor?
Leonard: A favor? Sure, you can ask me a favor, I would do you a favor for you.
Penny: It’s okay if you say no.
Leonard: Oh, I’ll probably say yes.
Penny: It’s just not the kind of thing you ask a guy you’ve just met.
Leonard: Wow.
Scene: Leonard and Sheldon, Inside Leonard’s car
Sheldon: I really think we should examine the chain of causality here.
Leonard: Must we?
Sheldon: Event A: A beautiful woman stands naked in our shower. Event B: We drive half way across town to retrieve a television set from the aforementioned woman’s ex-boyfriend. Query, on what plane of existence is there even a semi-rational link between these events?
Vocabulary:
to examine = to look at something carefully and in detail in order to discover something about it
chain of causality / chain of causation = the links that bind cause and effect together
causality = the relationship of cause and effect
to retrieve = to find and bring back something
aforementioned (very formal) = mentioned earlier
planes of existence / spiritual planes = This is an esoteric term. The idea behind it is that people have different ways of viewing the world and different notions of how the world functions.
semi-rational = partly rational
(definitions partly taken from the Cambridge and Collins Dictionary)
#3 massive
The group wants to participate in a robot fight against Barry Kripke. The only problem is that Kripke’s robot is incredibly massive.
Transcript:
Leonard: Nice little bot you’ve got here.
Kripke: I’m aware.
Leonard: What’s this do, spin?
Kripke: Yep. At 3400 rpm. It can cut through steel like it was rubber.
Leonard: Neat. Good work. Sheldon, we’ve got to call this off.
Sheldon: No, Leonard. For years, merciless thugs like Kripke have made my life a series of painful noogies and humiliating wedgies and the insensitively named Indian Burns. That stops now.
Raj: But, Sheldon, we don’t have a chance. The only improvement you were able to make on the robot was to put fresh batteries in the remote.
Sheldon: What you fail to realize is Kripke suffers from a fatal flaw, overconfidence from his robot’s massive size and its overwhelming power.
Raj: That’s not overconfidence, that’s observation.
Sheldon: Trust me, Kripke will fall easy prey to my psychological warfare. Observe. Kripke! I would ask if your robot is prepared to meet its maker, but as you are its maker, clearly the two of you have met.
Vocabulary:
bot = short for robot
rpm = revolutions per minute: used when stating the number of times something goes round during a minute
neat = good
to call something off = to decide that a planned event will not happen, or to end an activity because it is no longer useful or possible
merciless = having or showing no mercy
thug = a man who acts violently
noogie [Am.] = a hard rubbing with the knuckles on someone’s head, or occasionally elsewhere, intended to inflict pain
wedgie = a prank in which the victim’s undershorts are jerked upward so as to become wedged between the buttocks
Indian Burn = the action of grabbing someone’s arm with both hands and twisting the skin in opposite directions
fatal flaw = a big mistake, which causes something to be less effective or valid
to fall prey to something = to be influenced by something
(definitions taken from the Cambridge, Collins and Urban Dictionary)
#4 ordinary
Sheldon has no job at the moment. So he decides to accompany Penny to the Supermarket and do some grocery shopping.
Transcript:
Sheldon: This is great. Look at me, in the real world of ordinary people, just living their ordinary, colorless, workaday lives.
Penny: Thank you.
Sheldon: No, thank you. And thank you, ordinary person. Hey, you want to hear an interesting thing about tomatoes?
Penny: Uh, no, no not really. Listen, didn’t you say you needed some eggs.
Sheldon: Uh, yes, but anyone who knows anything about the dynamics of bacterial growth knows to pick up their refrigerated foods on the way out of the supermarket.
Penny: Oh, okay, well maybe you should start heading on out then.
Sheldon: No, this is fun. Oh, the thing about tomatoes, and I think you’ll really enjoy this, is, they’re shelved with the vegetables, but they’re technically a fruit.
Penny: Interesting.
Sheldon: Isn’t it?
Penny: No, I mean what you find enjoyable.
Vocabulary:
workaday = ordinary; not unusual
bacterial = used to describe things that relate to or are caused by bacteria
refrigerated = kept cold in a fridge
(definitions taken from the Cambridge and Collins Dictionary)
#5 pathetic
Penny broke up with her ex-boyfriend, but she is upset because she still loves him. So Leonard tries to comfort her.
Transcript:
Penny: Oh God, you know, four years I lived with him, four years, that’s like as long as High School.
Sheldon: It took you four years to get through High School?
Leonard: Don’t.
Penny: I just, I can’t believe I trusted him.
Leonard: Should I say something? I feel like I should say something.
Sheldon: You? No, you’d only make it worse.
Penny: You want to know the most pathetic part? Even though I hate his lying, cheating guts, I still love him. Is that crazy?
Sheldon: Yes.
Leonard: No, it’s not crazy it’s, uh, uh, it’s a paradox. And paradoxes are part of nature, think about light. Now if you look at Huygens, light is a wave, as confirmed by the double-slit experiments, but then, along comes Albert Einstein and discovers that light behaves like particles too. Well, I didn’t make it worse.
Vocabulary:
to comfort somebody = to make someone feel better when they are sad or worried
pathetic = sad, weak, or not very good
to hate someone’s guts = to dislike someone very much
paradox = a situation that is difficult to understand because it contains two opposite facts or characteristics
Huygens = a Dutch mathematician, physicist, astronomer, and inventor of the 17th century
Double-slit experiment = The double-slit experiment demonstrates that light and matter can satisfy the classical definitions for both waves and particles.
particle = an extremely small piece of something
(definitions taken from the Collins Dictionary, the Cambridge Dictionary, and Wikipedia)