Query: Why "she" in reference to a ship?

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:22 PM -0800 1/17/06, FRITZ JUENGLING wrote:
>I think just about everyone has wondered this.  Certainly, it comes
>from Star Trek, where Kirk always refers to the Enterprise as she.
>Seriously, I have heard that 'she' (BTW, I wrote an article on the
>etymology of 'she' a few years ago) is used for ships, cars, etc. as
>terms of endearment--the speaker feels some sort of closeness to
>that object as he would to his sweetheart.  This explanation sounds
>a bit dubious to me, tho.
>
>If I remember correctly, in OE it was 'seo scip' --feminine.
>Perhaps modern 'she' is a remnant of OE gender.
>

Again, even that's a necessary condition, it can't be
sufficient--it's not an accident that it's ships, cars, and countries
(each canonically conducted or piloted by a male "driver") that
retain their OE feminine in the form of a pronoun and not tables,
feathers, or whatever.  (Sorry I don't know enough OE to come up with
actual examples of feminine OE nouns that are never anything but "it"
now, but virtually any will do other than the above short list.)

larry

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