My impression is that Spock meant that the Eugenics Wars ended in the mid 1990's.
What Spock is stating, grammatically speaking, is that the mid-1990s fall within the period known as "your last so-called world war". That is, the last World War covers the mid-1990s (which is the timespan of interest here because that's when DY-100 went out of production and probably also out of regular operations) and possibly expands beyond it in both directions.
It's pretty out of character for McCoy to pass up a chance to explicitly tell Spock that he was wrong about something.
He's perfectly calm, indicating that he's expanding on the information Spock just provided, not disagreeing with it.
Mmm. My take on that is "gently chiding", which is another McCoy forte.
Heck, we've even had more recent examples
But those do not deal with "systematic" naming - the issue here specifically is a
series of wars known by a common name, "World Wars". Once the series gets going, separate names should fall into disfavor, just like "The Great War" has done (except for insignificant usage by random people - hey, there still are Zoroastrians and Druids, too! Doesn't mean that they would matter in a world of sevenish billion people.)
Why would McCoy be a "Great War buff"? The whole thing is in his truly distant past, unlike WWI today. It apparently didn't touch his native country at all (unless his great-great-grandparents lived in the Old World, which we can certainly speculate upon). It's not particularly relevant to his profession or known worldviews.
Interestingly, McCoy responds with plural - "The last of your so-called World War" = "The Eugenics Wars". Does he mean that
all the World Wars have been renamed "Eugenics Wars"? That would make a lot of sense - WWII was about eugenics, the aftermath of WWIII has been established to have been about eugenics (the Colonel Green thing in ENT), and we (and they!) could easily overlook WWI not being all that much about eugenics insofar as it was all about colonialism and racism.
[quote If Spock had really made a blunder like that, do you really think he wouldn't say something like,
"Thank you, Doctor...[/quote]
He does say "
Indeed".
And the entire teaser consists of the main heroes making mistakes, the immediate corrections coming as simple statements of fact rather than gleeful tirades. Spock: "Can't be Earth ship"; Uhura: "Sends Earth Morse". Kirk is smug; Spock comments; Kirk admits to schadenfreude. But that's it - its covered now, even though the mistakes and corrections continue.
- Kirk: "DY-500"; Spock: "No, DY-100"
- Kirk: "Is derelict"; McCoy: "Life onboard"
- McCoy: "Can't be human"; events: "Is human"
Adding Spock: "Last World War"; McCoy "Eugenics Wars" would simply be following form.
I would gather the 37 million were those that died from combat while the remaining of the 600 million were fallout, famine, and disease.
Yup. The whole concept of saying "this many died in this conflict" is a bit odd in itself. People die all the time: lethality of dying is 100%. People don't stop dying just because it's war. How many died
in WWI? Well,
everybody. How many died
out of WWI? Debate rages. Would there have been Spanish Flu without the war? Would there have been a more effective response to it if not for war propaganda and censorship? Which diseases were brought to Europe (or Africa and Asia) by troop movements alone, and which would have arrived regardless?
Other reasons for the discrepancy can be postulated, though. Spock might have been speaking of a different war. Research (including time travel) might have revealed new things about the era between TOS and TNG. Research (including time travel) may have
contributed to a change in casualties...
Timo Saloniemi
And "The Great War" is obviously still known as an alternate name for WWI, as no one in this thread has gone, "The Great War? What's that?"
