Star Trek: The No True Scotsman Fallacy

I was struck by the following comment made by Keith Badowski in his review of the second Star Trek novel, Spock Must Die!
 

I found Blish’s dialogue for Scotty to be a fairly elaborate depiction of a Scottish brogue. Apparently Blish took greater pains to be accurate with brogue than even James Doohan.

This was a pretty interesting observation, I thought, so I went to the novel and outlined those parts of it where Scotty, the Enterprise‘s erstwhile engineer, speaks.

James Blish was an American author who moved to England during the latter part of his life, so it should come as no surprise that his attempts to bring Scotty’s speech patterns to life would be more accurate, if also more pronounced versions of a Scottish brogue. James Doohan, who played Scotty, always kept the accent light and mostly understandable to an American audience.

James Blish

On page 103, Scotty says, in response to something Kirk asks, “Sair good for ye” which is Scottish slang for “Good for you.” To someone reading this in America, it might be hard to detect Scotty’s meaning, and even more hard to detect the sarcasm behind the meaning.

But it’s even more complicated than that. To convey Scotty’s accent, Blish resorts to phonetic spellings of Scotty’s words. “Now” becomes “noo” and “little” becomes “leetle.” Instead of saying “I don’t know” Scotty will say “I dinna ken.”

James Doohan as “Scotty”

Scottish slang words are inserted into Scotty’s dialog willy nilly. Instead of saying that a problem vexes his, Scotty uses the word “fashes.” Instead of saying something is “great” Scotty uses the word “mickle.” At one point Scotty goes so far as to exclaim, exclaim “Hoot mon!” Under Blish, Scotty’s accent and word choice could sometimes border on the comical, reminding one more of Groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons than a true Scotsman.

Groundskeeper Willie

James Doohan kept it subtle, giving the audience the flavor of a Scotsman without the confusion of Scottish slang. Blish was trying to inject a little more Scot into Scotty, perhaps on the belief that no true Scotsman would speak the way Doohan portrays him. Fortunately, as Keith Badowski pointed out when he noticed Blish’s tampering,

Thankfully though, most Trek novelists emulate Doohan and keep it simple.