It is hard, and to be clear the author didn't try to do anything with the language. It was cultural references, where many and most were shared but every now and then the character from the past made a reference the future people didn't get.
Some of it was humor, i think. Another bit of setting the future was with a use of a phrase we'd recognize and a quick disagreement over whether it was from the Bible or Shakespeare -- when neither. One of these "proverbs" was "space is cold", and the character from the past saying that the person who wrote that did not intend it to be a proverb. (I guess that's George Lucas's line about "Space is cold" from episode 1? But so many many people say space is cold....) The book starts a riff on Churchill's description of Russia as "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" but doesn't play that game then.
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timeasmymeasure
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Some of it was humor, i think. Another bit of setting the future was with a use of a phrase we'd recognize and a quick disagreement over whether it was from the Bible or Shakespeare -- when neither. One of these "proverbs" was "space is cold", and the character from the past saying that the person who wrote that did not intend it to be a proverb. (I guess that's George Lucas's line about "Space is cold" from episode 1? But so many many people say space is cold....) The book starts a riff on Churchill's description of Russia as "A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" but doesn't play that game then.