What do those uniform colors mean, anyway?!
- Thread starter Neopeius
- Start date
IDIC. I never heard of it once before.
There’s some anecdotal evidence that with the decline of handwriting and the increased use of keyboards and on screen keyboards has come decline of many symbols and punctuation marks. The ¡ and ¿ in Spanish seems to be in decline, perhaps in small part because they’re not right there like ? ! or people don’t know how to find them when texting. In English, everyone uses a minus instead of the four kinds of dashes (hypen, minus, en and em dashes) because there’s just that one key. ¿So is 12-13 a math problem or a range? Clearer when it’s 12–13. You don’t see ℅ and its ilk much any more, either.
Likewise, spelling checkers are obliterating some common alternative spellings which are totally correct but not the default.
Not saying this is good or bad, as language and writing systems are always evolving.
Likewise, spelling checkers are obliterating some common alternative spellings which are totally correct but not the default.
Not saying this is good or bad, as language and writing systems are always evolving.
^^ Implementation has it's effect on that as well, both in the range of characters available and in ease of use. Early programmers weren't trying to be obscure when coming up with !=, <=, >= for the symbols ≠, ≤, and ≥; early character sets like ASCII simply didn't have the range for those symbols to be available. So they were workarounds that became legacies in the computer languages that came after.
I do the two hyphens in a row, then type, and it turns into a dash to set off the text. I think an em- , but I don't know.
How were they named?
edit: Now I know. And the usage difference between an en- and a hyphen are interesting.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/em-dash-en-dash-how-to-use
How were they named?
edit: Now I know. And the usage difference between an en- and a hyphen are interesting.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/em-dash-en-dash-how-to-use
Yeah. I used to write for magazines and we were expected to do markup for special characters. So we were expected to indicate what sort of dashes to use, etc. That started me down the road of learning all that stuff. Plus, working in computer/video gaming I had to type © and ® and ™ a lot in documents so I learned all the ways to type those.
Frankly, I wish English employed the ¿ and ¡ because it’s useful to know if something is an interrogative or an exclamation before reaching the end of a sentence. I started using them in podcast/radio scripts that would be cold-read for that reason.
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I am issuing my first album and the sound recording gets a p in a cricle for phonorecord. You don’t see that a whole lot now, but I wanted a retro look. (We are recreating the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan cover, etc.) Luckily the artwork template had a special symbol font with the p.
Windows users try these in the TrekBBS editor ( hold ALT, type number on the numpad with numlock on, release ALT):
en dash: 0150 example: –
em dash: 0151 example: —
also
ellipse: 0133 example: …
trademark: 0153 example: ™
copyright: 0169 example: ©
registered: 0174 example: ®
degree: 0186 example: 85º
"Spanish ?": 0191 example: ¿
I remember those. Easier to type on the Mac for sure.
So if we assume that TMP was getting close to the real Navy colors, then this would be very similar, with Kirk and Sulu in the two officer colors, except that this COULD make Checkov and some others in the darker kahki be marines
The sciences sweater in the movies could look purple at times, and Seven of Nine had a purplish suit, so it could be some type of sciences or astrometrics department??
I understood that it was the same dye always, be it the regular shirt, the wraparound tunic, or the dress uniform, and the fabric's properties made it look different for different versions. So the third season shirt would be the same dye as was used all along, and it just looked like that fabric made it look. When a real uniform fabric gets a revision, this can happen.
Oh that's very helpful! Thank you.
By the way, for those thinking I had a hole in my head for calling Kirk's uniform "brown", I used this picture as representative and did a color-search to figure out what it is.
This color is "Barley Corn" -- "primarily a color from Yellow color family. It is a mixture of orange and brown color."
(I recognize that sometimes the uniform comes across as chartreuse, too. But the color above feels the most common. I'd definitely call this brown or bronze before I called it yellow).
Honestly, I think that the reason "gold" is the term that gets the most attention is that it can cover several shades from greenish to yellowish to brownish. It is easier to type "gold" than "command color" over and over again, and for most people it satisfies them whether they see greenish-gold or yellowish-gold.
This can be true of real uniforms, too. But when you see 100 people parading by for 2 minutes, you might not notice unless you were looking for it.
YES! Finally a terminology that works for the 3 colors on TOS that is different from the Command/Sciences/Operations terminology used in most off-screen materials.
With the caveat that in Star Trek, at least engineering and communications officers are "line" (e.g. Scott, DeSalle, and Uhura -- interestingly, both DeSalle and Uhura were previously seen in gold, so maybe they are exceptions, and Scott may be an exception like Spock is an exception.)
Which brings me back around to a question I was thinking to revisit and it ties nicely to this thread: Is the shirt color based on the job you are doing, or the training that you have?
As a side note on the shirt color thing: The uniform worn during WWII by the US Army was apparently called "browns and pinks" by the soldiers. (The "brown" was also sort of green to me.) The pants, called "pink," are similar to the color worn by Scotty and Mitchell in the 2nd pilot, so maybe the color system for TOS is "gold/green/whatever-you-call-it," blue, red, and "pink." "Pink" would then be a color indicating some kind of support role, similar to the one worn by lieutenants in TMP.
So TOS calling people things like "Nurse Chapel" would have at one time been essentially a rank that would have been used instead of Ensign or LT or Commander or whatever was needed?
In Court martial, Spock is listed as having two billets ("First Officer, Science Officer") so maybe Kirk extends to him the choice of color.
Here's a question about Science blue. The costume designer for Superman (1978) had to settle for a lighter shade than she wanted for Reeve's costume, to keep from messing up blue screen effects. I wonder if Theiss had to work around the same consideration when he picked out his three dye shades. Like if shooting the actors on a blue stage for fx was allowed for as a possibility.
Interesting idea, I don't think there's anything to it. In TMP the blue color that the ship's top officers wore would be closest to the dungarees of the enlisted navy grades.
In the thought exercise of what a viewer in December 1966 would have been able to piece together about what the colors meant, there would have been some strong clues that security guards also wore red; "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" comes to mind. Stronger evidence about security would come along later in season 1 with "Devil in the Dark."
The term was "pinks and greens" and it was the officer's service uniform. The coat was darker brownish green, the lighter "pink" trousers a kind of grayish-tan or taupe color, which sometimes, to some people, had some rosy tones in it. But this does touch on consensus or agreement on color terms, and how that lines up, or not, with official names.
Also, officers' uniforms were privately made; there were not massive stocks of standardized, government contract fabric like there were for enlisted uniforms, so there was also a fairly wide variation in the actual hues. It's not obvious individually, but it can be noticeable when compared side by side.
After WW2 the Army standardized so officers and enlisted wore the same color of "olive drab," then "Army Green" in the '50s, and then within the past couple of years the retro "Army Green Service Uniform," which is an updated (and IMO poorly executed) version of the WW2 pink and greens, but now worn by all grades.
A person's rank and what you actually call them are sometimes two different things. In TOS most officers were called "mister," but it was clearly not their rank. It is still common for "doctor," "nurse" and "chaplain" (or "father" etc as appropriate) to be used regardless of rank, and "captain" of course for a vessel's commanding officer.
The 19th century US Navy titles were somewhat complicated, and changed over the years. The Royal Navy titles were even more complex.
I always took it as the job you're doing, regardless of other training. For instance, Scotty is clearly the engineering officer, but he sits in the center seat multiple times, and Sulu and Chekov both defer to him. So he has some line officer experience, regardless of shirt color. Same with Spock, who serves two roles.
Agreed, that seems to be the strongest correlation.
And Lt DeSalle also came up from engineering to take temporary command.
IIRC they made a greenish costume for him for only the bluescreen shots and color graded it back to bluish in the lab. Also, there’s relatively little bluescreen for the titular character in Superman because they leaned mostly on the Zoptic front projection system.
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So, I know this isn't really the thread for this but what is poorly executed of this version? Bearing in mind that I have no service experience but have always appreciated the uniforms and their history in the US Armed Forces.
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