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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| As regular readers know, sometimes, I like to delve deep and tackle the biggest, most important questions of existence. What Does the Ship Designation ‘SS’ Mean?  The initialism was originally a bit of shipbuilder marketing. Oh, well that explains it then. Have a great day! ...okay, fine, I'll go into details. Often, when you see the name of a boat (or a ship, for that matter), the name of the vessel itself will be prefixed by a short set of letters. One thing I'll always resent my father for is that, despite having been a sailor for over 30 years, he never bothered to explain to me the difference between a boat and a ship. Even now, after figuring out a lot about that distinction on my own, I'm still a little baffled. Even after reading the link at the link, which links to a link about the distinction, it's clearly not clear. Some things are immutably carved into the granite of Fact, though: A ship can carry a boat while a boat cannot carry a ship; a submarine is always a boat; a boat that plies a river is always a boat, not a ship. Also, apparently, even though they don't actually exist yet except in the most rudimentary form, interplanetary conveyances will be known as "ships." There are so many different forms of these letters that you might think they’re little more than a random license-plate style code number. Well, no, because that's one aspect of my education my dad didn't neglect. ...and in civilian vessels, the most frequently encountered of these prefixes is probably SS. Maybe because it's easy to slip an O in the middle? SS dates back to the mid-1800s, when the Age of Sail came to an end and faster coal-powered ships became the norm. The shipbuilders of the day wanted a means of setting their modern vessels apart from the wind-powered ones of the past, and labeling each one SS—meaning “steamship”—did the trick. Not what I'd consider marketing, but okay. As naval technologies continued to change, however, so too did people’s understanding of precisely what SS was intended to mean. Because of course it did. Not all vessels are civilian operated, of course. In the United States, all craft of the U.S. Navy are prefixed with the letters USS, standing for “United States Ship.” As we all know, this convention will be carried into space on the USS Enterprise, only it won't be "United States Ship," but the more contrived "United Space [or Star] Ship," supposedly a reference to the United Federation of Planets. So, there it is: the Big Question, answered. You're welcome. |
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