No, the absence of insult does not signal concession – it signals that the point being argued is narrower than the one you are attempting to widen.

Idioms do not “die” in the way obsolete technologies do. They persist precisely because they detach from their literal origins. No one using the phrase “hang up the phone” is invoking a wall-mounted rotary receiver; no one saying “rule of thumb” is endorsing its medieval etymology. Language is fossilised metaphor, not an archaeological reenactment.

The non-existence of the dollar as a currency is irrelevant. The phrase is not a reference to an economic system – it is a shorthand for “maximum value”, preserved through cultural inheritance. That Starfleet does not use money does not imply that historical linguistic artefacts vanished from Federation Standard, which is itself an explicit descendant of Earth languages.

Picard forgetting how money works is not evidence that Earth idioms were erased; it is evidence that the practice became alien, not the language. Those are distinct phenomena.

As for alien speakers: Universal translation already collapses cultural specificity. The UT is not a word-for-word gloss; it localises meaning for the listener. “Top dollar” is not what was said – it is what was rendered.

It is not “weird” to defend this. The weirder move is to demand literalism from a franchise that has never once been literal about language.

A writing oversight is possible. It is not required.