was NX01 ever referred to as 'The' Enterprise?
- Thread starter Khan 2.0
- Start date
That one doesn't count, since the article goes with "sensor logs."
The change in the later series to dropping the article, as I understand it, was done to reflect preferred modern US Naval parlance. Apparently you're only supposed to use "the" if you include "USS," because you're treating the abbreviation as equivalent to the full phrase -- so you'd refer to "the USS Shipname," because you're effectively saying "the United States Ship Shipname." But otherwise, you treat the name the same way you'd treat a personal name, i.e. with no article before it.
Note, also, that several Trek novelists were referring to Kirk's ship as "Enterprise" rather than "the Enterprise" way back in the 1980s, before even TNG existed. Which I figure was because they understood Naval conventions better than the producers of the shows and movies did.
So they didn't change the usage just to be different from TOS, they changed it because they improved their research.
They shifted more towards just calling the ship Enterprise after VOY, where after the first few episodes it became known as Voyager--seeing as "the Voyager" doesn't really sound right, not like the Enterprise or the Defiant.
That's total conditioning from the show at work. Had the characters regularly called her "the Voyager" from the start, it wouldn't sound wrong.
Hello, new here, even if the writers went out of there way with the referrals to enterprise or the enterprise name when you are assigned to a posting; as in my case Fort Bragg after awhile you tend to call it Bragg. Same thing with ships IE USCGC Spencer we called it Spencer after being there a few cruises. and other names..........
I remember being bothered that they called the Nx-01 just "Enterprise". I would feel that it being the only "Real" starship of the time, that they would feel inclined to call her "THE Enterprise". It also bothered me that it was an "NX" class rather than an "Enterprise" Class. Afterall, didnt the other starships that were shown have "NX" on their hull?
I agree with you on this point. NX signifies "prototype". And the first ship is usually named for the class. It should have been the Enterprise class ship, Enterprise, NX-01. Then they launch the Enterprise class ship, Columbia, NCC-02 (or would that be NCC-01?).
I think they were following the established precedent of TOS class designations like DY-100 and J-class. There was evidence that older ship classes used letter designations, so they combined that with the established usage of "NX."
This is something that always bothered me too in the beginning of Enterprise, but I got used to it. It annoys me more in later work in the novels. For example in DGRIII's Serpents Among The Ruins and Allegiance In Exile, he did the same thing, referring to the E-B and the 1701 as Enterprise compared to saying "the" Enterprise. It took me out of the story for a few seconds.
Similar threads
