Re: the skin tab/Kosh's hand/encounter suit question...one of the
reasons I can't wait for the series to get on the air is so that we can
make one thing clear, once and for all: it is NOT an error, not a plot
hole, it is a plot POINT. It is a question that our *characters* will
be asking each other. How can this be? This will come up more than once,
starting with "The Parliament of Dreams" episode.

jms

The point you raise is absolutely accurate. When it comes to making
up names for civilizations, or characters, one goes for the *sound* of the
name or the sense of the name. "Minbar" is one of those terms whose
meaning, unlike Yangs and Coms (Yanks and Commies) is NOT well known; ask
any 100 people on the street, and it's *very* unlikely that ANY of them
would know what a minbar is. Because the Minbari are very spiritual (well,
half of them, anyway), and because I always liked the *sound* of the word
"minbar," that became the name. It has no dead-on meaning, there is no
translation, it doesn't describe what they are. I don't think it's as
blunt as the examples cited, because it's a *very* obscure term; in all
this time, only that ONE person recognized its origins.

jms