Show him a book about it, and he'd be talking circles around anyone else within days, but throw all this technical jargon at him, and Shepard might as well be giving him 4000 new rules to study on the spot. Still, he makes mental note of the words, and who he might potentially ask about them, that would be a little better at explaining them rather than shouting them at him.

"You can hardly blame me for not understanding the minutia of a world I've never been to," he crosses his arms, "fine, so maybe they're real things that I just don't know about, but you don't see me calling you daft for not knowing a spiritual array from a golden thread formation."

Unless she did, of course, but his mouth had already run off before the rest of him could catch up.