“Why is any object we don’t understand always called a ‘thing’?”
Pavel arches a brow, letting his expression of surprised disbelief say everything that his self preservation instincts force him to bite back.
"And what would you rather we call it?" Pavel asks, bewildered. "It is a temporary classification so we can still refer to it in some way that makes sense. And it is much easier to say than, the unknown object directly ahead of us at X coordinates."
Pavel looks at said spherical thing that towers over them covered with writings and markings he has never seen before and hums. "There is nothing wrong with calling it a thing. You know what the word means, yes? It is an object that cannot or has not yet been given a proper designation." And in this case, thing is the only applicable way to describe it.
He pulls out his tricorder. "But maybe a scan will reveal some more information about it."