Post by A FriendPost by A FriendIt is, however, The Earth. BTW some of the initial source materials
for Star Trek refer to Spock's home planet as The Vulcan.
Actually, it's just "Earth", even though popular usage often
incorrectly tosses in the "The".
If you mean popular usage over the course of several millennia, then I
don't disagree.
And I'm endlessly having to explain to people the difference between
"Earth" (the planet) and "earth" (soil).
You need to meet some brighter people.
And I never saw anything in early Star Trek materials that called
Spock's planet "The Vulcan", though there were some mentions of it as
"Vulcanis" before it later was conformed to match the name of its
inhabitants as "Vulcan".
The reference to The Vulcan was in the boatload of material Roddenberry
(or, rather, his office) shipped to James Blish in the UK when Mr.
Blish was tasked to write adaptations of TV episodes he'd actually
never seen. Mr. Blish was quite ill at the time and was largely
incapable of writing, so the adaptations were actually written by Mr.
Blish's wife and his mistress. (The three of them lived together and
were quite friendly.) Mr. Blish never enjoyed such fame or prosperity
during his career as he did at the end of it, with Star Trek, but he
was very happy about his late success, which he richly deserved.
I don't know how you know the particular content
of what was shipped to Blish. I have nearly every
official reference work on Star Trek history
published since 1968 (which include reproductions
of the early show bibles and volumes of internal
memos) and don't ever recall coming across "The
Vulcan" in any of them, though if you can cite an
actual reference I'd certainly check it out. I
don't know where you came up with the gossip
about Blish, Lawrence and a supposed mistress;
Blish wasn't incapacitated when he contracted to
do the books but he didn't like doing them so
while his wife is credited as co-author only on
volume 12 she is rumoured to have been the actual
author (supposedly along with her mother) of
volumes 6-12 (she of course did the final 13th,
after Blish's death, herself and is credited as
such).
Post by A FriendAs for the rest, the historic expression is "the earth," with no cap E.
Again, as an expression, but not as the actual
planetary name.
Post by A FriendThe reference to The Vulcan is in a bit of Kirk's dialogue in the
adaptation of "Tomorrow Is Yesterday." No doubt it's an outlier.
Remember that Blish et al never saw the episodes
and worked from early draft scripts, not even
final ones, so some adaptations were substantially
different from what aired; the cited dialogue in
this story mentioning "The Vulcan" never made it
to film, so clearly is an error, and it was too
early in the publishing program for the Bantam
editor to have recognised it as such and corrected
it.