And that was one of the changes the movies made from the series. It's interesting to realize how much of the modern perception of TOS is rooted more in the movies than in the series. There's the perception of Kirk as a renegade, based mainly on The Search for Spock and its aftermath, when TOS Kirk was a good soldier who almost always followed orders even when he disagreed with them (e.g. "The Galileo Seven," "A Taste of Armageddon," etc.). There's the focus on Earth. There's the 23rd-century setting, something never made explicit until TMP and TWOK. And there's the standardized use of the term "mind meld." TOS used a mix of terms for it; in the first season it was just an unnamed "Vulcan technique," the second season used "mind probe" three times and "mind touch" once, the third season used "mind meld" twice and "mind fusion" and "mind link" once each, and the animated series went back to "mind touch." It wasn't until the movies (TMP, TSFS, TVH) that "mind meld" became the default term.
Yeah, I guess I could see how those others would have been more widely used and more popular back then. It does show how language tends to come and go, and evolve. I think that out of any of those, probe sounds the most science-fiction-ny. But at the same time, maybe they were looking to create something more unique, less expected? You say meld wasn't a widely used term, and maybe that's the whole point. Maybe in the end, they wanted to apply an uncommon word to their sci-fi setting. With all of those different names for it in TOS, it seems to me they hadn't settled on the idea of what to call it.
