Ah-ha! So "Starship Enterprise" and "USS Enterprise" would both be technically wrong from a trademark standpoint?
Question for the ST Authors: Is there a ST Style Guide?
- Thread starter JonnyQuest037
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Correct.
Good to know. Thanks!
The bit about using the reminds of something that's always kind of bothered me. I've never been able to figure out why sometimes they put the in front of ships names, like the Enterprise or the Defiant, but sometimes they don't, like Voyager is always just Voyager, not the Voyager.
I can certainly see "Starship Enterprise", but the fact that "U.S.S. Enterprise" can be trademarked at all sort of surprises me, since it's a real-life ship name, and at least one of them existed well before Star Trek. Does that mean there could be legal repercussions if someone were to create a television show or write a novel set aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier?
Trademarks are usually fairly limited (for instance, how there's a record company and a computer company both named "Apple"). And the registrations are public, for obvious reasons, so let's run a search.
I've found three relevant entries (and two others for "Starship Enterprise" that aren't Trek-related. I suspect I'm not using the system correctly, rather than that TPTB neglected to file a comprehensive trademark protection for "Starship Enterprise").
"The Starship Enterprise" for pewter sculptures.
"U.S.S. Enterprise" for pewter sculptures.
"U.S.S. Enterprise" for die cast model spaceships and scale model spaceship kits.
^ Just to let you know, when I click on your links, all I get is:
What a remarkably lousy website. They should talk to the National Archive or Library of Congress people, their databases are a lot more friendly.
Well it appears I can't link to the search results, but you can try it yourself. You'll have to put "USS Enterprise" rather than "U.S.S. Enterprise," even though the registration is for the latter; the periods caused the search to have an error.
Well it appears I can't link to the search results, but you can try it yourself. You'll have to put "USS Enterprise" rather than "U.S.S. Enterprise," even though the registration is for the latter; the periods caused the search to have an error.
I think it's just that the VOY writers thought that calling it "Voyager" instead of "the Voyager" sounded better.
The switch didn't bug me until they started doing ENT, and then suddenly all the characters started saying stuff like, "We've got to get you back to Enterprise" instead of "We've got to get you back to the Enterprise." After 30 years of watching the shows where everyone referred to the ship as "the Enterprise", that just sounded so wrong to me.
They did say 'the Voyager' a few times in Season 1, but it was dropped rather quickly after that.
(note this search also includes annotations, not just dialogue)
http://scriptsearch.dxdy.name/?page=results&query=({series|voy,}) and ({line|The Voyager,})
Some aliens (and the real Barclay once) would occasionally referred to her as 'The Voyager' in later episodes, but the ship's crew stopped.
(note this search also includes annotations, not just dialogue)
http://scriptsearch.dxdy.name/?page=results&query=({series|voy,}) and ({line|The Voyager,})
Some aliens (and the real Barclay once) would occasionally referred to her as 'The Voyager' in later episodes, but the ship's crew stopped.
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Is that the same reason the older novels referred to the station as "Deep Space Nine"? I always hated that. I seem to recall that around the time the relaunch began, though, it became just "Deep Space 9," so clearly the stipulation wasn't absolute.
I remember when writing The Tears of Eridanus and A Choice of Catastrophes, whoever did the copy editing went through and replaced all of my "electronic clipboards" (the term ingrained in my head from the 1980s Pocket novels) with "data slates" (which I have an irrational hatred of). So clearly there is a house style held in someone's head if not written down.
I remembering "DS-Nine" popping up in the more recent novels. I never doubled back to check, but it certainly felt like a new and odd way to write it.
It was used among the first DS9 novels as well, the pilot adaptation and Peter David's The Siege.
Yeah, I don't like that, it just looks weird.
Oh, there's definitely an attempt to keep things consistent these days. I've learned to use "data slates" instead of "electronic clipboards" as well because that's the preferred term at present. But I've never seen an official style guide or anything.
Hmm. I guess we now know who "Stevil2001" is. Greetings, Mr. Mollmann.
Ever since TNG introduced and standardized the nomenclature, I'd always regarded them as simply TOS-era PADDs. After all, they were never actually called anything canonically. Then, of course, there's always the physical clipboards that appeared in "The Cage."
Ever since TNG introduced and standardized the nomenclature, I'd always regarded them as simply TOS-era PADDs. After all, they were never actually called anything canonically. Then, of course, there's always the physical clipboards that appeared in "The Cage."
Never been a secret, as far as I know! For a long time, my real name was my user name, but I decided that if my students Googled me, they didn't need to find me having arguments about canon.
"Electronic clipboards" has just got that great 1960s cheese vibe that "data slate" and "PADD" lack. It's a clipboard... but ELECTRONIC!
Weird. Any particular reason that they changed it from PADD?
Agreed!
So are the preferred spellings currently "Deep Space 9" and "Seven of Nine"? I'd assume that those would be the easier forms to trademark. Sorry if these are obvious questions, but I haven't read any DS9 or VOY novels in forever, so I really don't know.
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