TOS came out at a time when people still talked of Columbus discovering america.

They're like Rousseau's "Noble Savages" -- just another part of nature waiting to be improved and industrialized.

There wasn't even coffee in the nebula

I mean the original line was "where no man has gone before" which at least made sense, although it didn't represent the female crew very well.

TOS came out at a time when Columbus was still being held in high regard. :)

English uses 'man' and 'mankind' interchangeably.

Grammatically, 'no man' makes more sense than 'no one.'

Quick search suggests that the people of Columbia are still pretty happy with the name.

"I am no man!" Says the female crew, who proceeds to stab the space Nazgul in the eye.

I've always thought it was an odd change. I get why they did it, but the original clearly wasn't being used in the way the change implies.

It has the same energy as saying that you can't use the term "whitelist" and must substitute "allowlist", or "master bedroom" to "primary bedroom", or that time they changed "monkeypox" to "m-pox".

Meanwhile the people of Ohio's capital aren't

Someone else posted that they didn't consider getting rid of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben as big wins.

Most of the changes are performative and not material. imho.

I live in NYC and no one is actually pushing to get rid of Columbus Circle.

otoh, Trump has a Building right on Columbus Circle, so maybe we should ask Mamdani to rename it Obama Circle.

White version of discovery.

I have discovered this place! But we live here already. Nope, I'm the first to discover it!

Yeah it’s be hard to argue TOS was excluding women in that sentence given the presence of female bridge crew members.

Dunno. If i see my neighbor fucking cats i think i have made some sort of discovery, even if my neighbor clearly knew before me what he is doing.

What a terrible day to be literate.

I hate pointlessly gendered shit. No one sounds much better to me and makes the same grammatical sense as no man. I don’t see it as any different than using they instead of he or she.

They were big wins the same way getting rid of the Redskins was a big win for Native Americans. It’s not about the specific instance. It’s about what growing up in a world that tolerates that kind of portraying of ethnicity does to young minds.

You mean space secretary and space operator? The pilot had a woman as first officer but we couldn’t keep that for some reason…

"Master bedroom" being changed is such a silly one. That term wasn't even used until the 20th century and referred to the master of the household. It has nothing to do with slave masters.

It does bring up the point that "discovery" can also be a relative term.

It speaks to a larger cultural ignorance or poor literacy to even consider it, in my opinion. I've seen similar reactions to talking about "plantation-style" home architecture. It's as if many people have only ever heard these words in connection with slavery from their lessons in school.

It was a list:

• to explore strange new worlds
• seek out new life and new civilizations
• boldly go where no one has gone before

It wasn't considered as gendered, as referring to humanity as "man" is a holdover from when "man" wasn't ever gendered; we don't have any recordings of it specifically referring to males until around 1000 CE.

The old words for male/female were "wer" (see: werewolf) and "wīf", the latter of which diverged into "wifmann" ("female human"), later "woman", and "wife", specifically referring to a married woman. You still see "wife" used without implication of marriage status in words like "midwife".

Anyway tl;dr "man" historically wasn't gendered, hence it commonly being used to refer to humanity as a whole even in modern use. Also it more accurately states that no humans have been there before, rather than discounting present natives.

Edit: also, as another comment played on, this was used as wordplay in the Lord of the Rings, in which humanity is referred to as "the race of man", where a prophecy refers to no man being able to defeat one of the antagonists but doesn't specify that a woman can't.

But you cant deny the truth behind the words.

You mean the Yeoman and Communications Officer?

Those are actual roles on warships that at the time women were not allowed to fill. How come when a woman is in those roles you reduce them “secretary” and “operator”?

I don’t. The show did.

As I pointed out there was a woman first officer, but we could not keep that.

The show didn’t, you did. The show put women into positions reserved for men at the time. The men in those positions weren’t called secretaries or phone operators, the female characters in Star Trek weren’t called secretaries or phone operators. The only person being reductive of their roles is you lol.

It kinda seems like you’ve never seen the show. I’m well aware of what a Yeoman does on a ship and it is not limited to bringing the captain tea and having the log dictated to you (or you just stand there while dude writes it). Those are, however, things that a secretary did in the 60s. I’m not reducing their roles, there’s a reason that women were only given positions on the bridge that were traditionally filled by women in 60s offices and that the female first officer was removed from the show.

You don't have to go where you already are.

Yeah I don't disagree, but that is still why they changed it. Using "man" to refer to all mankind (and even "mankind" for that matter) is going out of style.

Boldly yes, but It's been a long road gettin' from there to here.

Meanwhile, Amerigo Vespucci, America's namesake:

That's the part of the story I can find funny. Columbus made four trips to the New World, set up colonies, and explored. He never set foot on the American mainland but he saw it with his own eyes, sailing up and down the Mexican coast looking for the Singapore Straight, which he obviously never found because it was busy being on the other side of the planet. He went to his deathbed believing he'd visited Asia. It wasn't until Mr. Vespucci made it all the way to Argentina before going "Dudes...there's no fucking way we're in the Philippines. There isn't a landmass thousands of miles long in the Philippines."

And he was right, which is why AMERICA! FUCK YEA!

The reason was Gene Roddenberry had cast his mistress in a costar role, and wasn't yet the Lucas-esque TV god that could get away with it.

That’s true, but they could have kept the part as a woman. There were other motivations in removing the role entirely.

Here's a fun one: Columbus is also credited with discovering the concept of magnetic declination (the difference between true and magnetic North.) In his logs, he noted that his compass had become somewhat misaligned with the North star. He was the first Western European to write about this, but it had been known since antiquity by those sailing the Indian ocean. But none of that was done by people who wrote in the Latin alphabet.

Discover new worlds, name them after yourself and then sell them things.

which makes no sense, because even then, we knew Columbus wasn't the first person there.

Goes into the women's bathroom because I really have to shit and the men's has been occupied for 20 minutes

Astronomer: I have discovered a kuiper belt object that no one has ever seen or detected before.

Archaeologist: I have discovered a chamber in the Great Pyramid that, while built by humans who could read and write, nobody has known about since the invention of the saddle.

CIA goon: I have figured out what these two currently living people are talking about.

I honestly don't know if Majel minded that much in retrospect; she's still the only actress to voice the Enterprise herself. She died in 2008 and most recently voiced the Enterprise D in what? 2024?

Progress happened. Uhura wore Lieutenant's stripes so Janeway could wear Captain's pips.

Eh. You don't have to be the first person to discover something to discover it. This is what people always miss with the vapid line about Columbus not discovering the Americas. Sure, there were already people there. But the vast majority of the human population in 1492 was ignorant of the very existence of the American continents. And their discovery instituted an epochal change that upended both the Americas and the old world.

We can condemn genocide and displacement without becoming pedantic gotcha warriors.

If all that matters is the first person to discover something, no scientist in human history has ever discovered anything. After all, relativity was probably first discovered 5 billion years ago by some alien physicist living several galaxies away.

Progress happening doesn’t negate my original point.

Fun fact: The first on-screen woman captain was in The Voyage Home.

So I suppose Star Treck are just the Colombus of space

I still think that Master and Slave were the most apt descriptions for IDE drive roles

Yes? the whole show is based on naval exploration, mercantilism, colonialism. That is why they have that whistle when an officer enters the ship, that is why there are no seatbelts.

Using warp engines, you don't really go anywhere; you bring the other place to you! 😃

And not just natives (who are invariably human shaped), they often have entire databases of info on them from presumably when they were "discovered".

Mass Effect was a better sci fi universe and I'll die on that hill.

Discovery is relative to perspective of the explorer, it is not a characteristic of what is explored. A person can be an explorer, a group, a society, a people can be the explorer on behalf of the group. All of humanity was not the group those explorers were exploring on behalf of.

You have to have some kind of racist perspective in you to claim that it is a white person issue. It is absolutely certain that individuals and groups had, and continue to have, similar concepts of discovery on behalf of their people or themselves, even if other people already knew of a thing. "Look what I found." Is literally that. If someone else knew about the thing, was it actually found since it wasn't really lost if anyone else knew already?

That said, from a perspective relative to humanity as a whole, no, white people didn't discover many things first, but it's relative to themselves and the people who learn of it from them. White people discovered the Americas for themselves and for most of the rest of the world. While First Nations were the first to make the discovery, that knowledge not being shared means others had to discover it as well. White people discovered the Americas and shared that knowledge with the rest of humanity so while not the first to discover the Americans they were the only ones who did who informed the rest of humanity, meaning they discovered it on behalf of most human beings and in doing so, get a relatively larger amount of credit for it. They absolutely did discover the Americas, they just weren't the first humans to do so.