Ship Names and Definite Articles

 Just a note, but I've fallen into a habit that I kind of like insofar as referencing starships.

My current operating rules, using the Defiant:

The Defiant
The USS Defiant
The USS Defiant, NCC-74205, or the USS Defiant (NCC-74205)
Defiant 74205
NCC-74205

What does that mean?  See below the jump . . . 

Back in the day, it was common for a starship to be referred to as "the Shipname", or "the USS Shipname", keeping to the traditional American style rather than the traditional British style.   Given that the British ships were HMS, this made some sense . . . "The United States Ship" makes sense whereas "The Her Majesty's Ship" does not. 

For whatever reason, however, the definite article "the" became less common in later Trek.   By the time Star Trek: Voyager came around, the eponymous ship was typically referred to without the definite article, e.g. "that's our ship; that's Voyager."   Only rarely did anyone slip . . . note Paris in "Parallax"[VOY1] noting the ship they saw was "the Voyager".

What's odd is that everyone was seen to do the definite article drop, from Admirals on down, while also referring to other ships using the definite article, e.g. "the Carolina" from "Inside Man"[VOY7].  There was never any particular explanation for why this was so.   Out of universe, it might tend to make the ship feel more like a character than an object, but, in-universe, it doesn't make sense why one ship would get this treatment and others would not.   

Unfortunately, this was also backported to the 2150s in the prequel series Enterprise.  Everyone referred to Enterprise sans definite article, which would only tend to make the definite article use later (in-universe) stand out that much more, and which makes referring to the show (out-of-universe, obviously) rather difficult.  Are you talking about the ship or the show?   How can you tell?   No one ever referred to it as "SS Enterprise, NX-01", even though that would've been accurate.

Curiously, the only times people tended to use the definite article was with the registry, e.g. Archer in "The Expanse" referring to "the NX-02" and Reed in "E²" suggesting the ship they saw was "the NX-02, Columbia".  In a lot of ways, that's even weirder than the definite article drop for a name.   If I'm wanting to refer to NCC-1701, I don't use an article, but I do if I want to refer to the Enterprise.   However, in the show Enterprise, they were literally reversing this.

Generally, if I wanted to give a ship name and a registry in a sentence, I'd have come at it like "the USS Enterprise, NCC-1701", or "the USS Defiant, NCC-74205" . . . though maybe I wouldn't have always used the definite article when giving the ship's full identifier, depending on the flow of the sentence.   However, nowadays, I seem to have picked up a little something from the title of the Pacific 201 production.   I haven't even watched the story, but I saw a breakdown of the ship way back when, and the name of the production makes for a very interesting shortcut (which I'm not sure they even used that way).

See, the Enterprise and Defiant mentioned above are just a few of a set of ships where a starship name has been reused.   Everyone tends to refer to the "Enterprise-D" or the "Enterprise-A" but that doesn't cover ships that aren't given the letter honorific.  So, people have been stuck with "the Potemkin (NCC-1657)" or "the Potemkin, NCC-1657" to contrast against the Potemkin, NCC-18253.   That's a little clunky, to say the least.

So, what I'm doing nowadays is referring to the Voyager or the Potemkin or the Enterprise with the definite article unless I am tacking on the registry number in the "Pacific 201" title style, at which point the article is dropped.   That is to say, I might talk about an engineer Rozhenko aboard the Potemkin or his service time aboard the USS Potemkin, NCC-18253, but I can also shorthand it by referring to a Mr. Rozhenko serving aboard Potemkin 18253.

The Enterprise-D can still be referred to that way, though one could argue that's a shortening of Enterprise 1701-D and the article is contrary.   Inertia exists, I suppose.   But, if I'm discussing Defiant 74205 and jump to Defiant 1764, this is quite a time saver and makes things a lot less clunky in practice.   

I'm also going to try to make it a practice not to just follow the Voyager / Enterprise show conventions.  It's the Voyager and the Enterprise, just as it's the ass which you may kiss.  But, there's a lot of inertia in addressing those properly versus how they'll always be heard in my head, from show soundbites, and so on, so expect slips.