I somehow found myself looking at a Wikipedia writeup on rejected Star Trek captain Christopher Pike, where there’s this little oddity:
Little is known about Pike’s personal life. According to dialog in “The Cage”, Pike is from the city of Mojave in North America on Earth in Southern California, and at one point owned a horse named “Tango”.
Emphasis mine. What’s so strange to me is the order of these geographic labels. Why place “Southern California” at the end of that list? Clearly, Earth isn’t in SoCal but vice versa, and the rendering can be read as true if you choose to do so:
- city of Mojave (which is in North America (which is on Earth)), which is in Southern California
So there’s a style question and a linguistic question:
Style: why not put SoCal between Mojave and N. America? Intentional choice or product of collaborative, cumulative authorship under the wiki model?
Linguistics: why does this ordering jump out at me so brightly when the meaning is unambiguous regardless of the ordering? Is this a “little red wagon” vs. “*red little wagon” thing?
In American English, we usually go from specific to general (ie. think job interview: I did X,Y,Z at Company A, and that’s why I’m a great ___). The sentence starts out this way, then breaks convention by finishing off with a colloquallistic detail (most people are familiar with Earth, North America, and Mojave—in that order—but not familiar with SoCal. The order even sounds weird in this explanation.) Given the explicit progression, you wouldn’t expect this return to specific. So yes, the argument is a little bit circular; the wording is weird because its weird.
FTFY. The “North America” and “Earth” parts are both stupid and superfluous. I thought maybe the strange wording was from the script, but it’s not. I think it’s just Too Many Cooks Syndrome.
Way to seize the reins, Plutor. I wonder if you’ll have some revert trouble, though — while North America seems ridiculous (I don’t think there’s a Mojave, California in Yugoslavia, for example), the Earth status might be considered useful if not precisely necessary given the intersteller nature of the show.
On the other hand, it’s a line in a subsection of an article about minor Star Trek characters.
On the other hand: Wikipedia.