@Nathaniel - I realize this is late, but coming back to this question, the fact that the Death Star can destroy planets was not only exposited in the beginning scroll, but also mentioned by Darth Vader in the meeting room scene before it's actually demonstrated. The way Vader says it (as a preface to his actual point), and the fact it builds on the other Admiral's statement that it's the "ultimate power in the universe" is good enough to get away with it, but without the original "narration" in the beginning, it almost goes too far the other way and buries this important fact.

@user12121114 - It's certainly rare in academic circles. Rule number 1 in writing; know your audience. If you're writing a post-doctoral paper to be read by other Ph.Ds, you use technical and academic language. If you're writing for the general public, you use more common vocabulary and explain the subject-specific academic terms you use. Neither are "bad", per se, but if you present a thesis written with a middle-school vocabulary to your Ph.D board they will treat you like a middle-schooler, while if you publish the post-doc paper in Newsweek, very few will bother attempting to understand it

The "twenty" line in the sand seems a bit arbitrary. For instance, it indicates you should use "three-fifteen" but fifteen minutes later should be written "3:30". I don't have good style-guide backing for this but it seems logical to me to use words for any "everyday" number, which I'd define as any number up to a hundred and any power of ten after that. That would mean you write out most numbers in a narrative except for decimals (like money), years (though I'd just use "the seventies" in your example unless the story is far-future) or strings of digits (phone numbers etc).

I agree it's not a great precedent, but the blogosphere has a lot of material drawing very cogent parallels. The hair you split here, where what Google got in trouble for was copying the names of classes and functions in the Java API, would be the equivalent of the existing vocabulary of a language like Klingon; you could argue, if Google could have and should have changed the names of classes and functions in the ADK, that anyone "copying" Klingon could keep the language structure but has to change all the words. As you say in your answer (which I upticked), it wouldn't be Java (or Klingon).