When did I mention Picard ? You didn ' t . But Picard is a concrete character and so if you can imagine how awful it would ' ve been if everything about him and his miniworld on a ship had been overtly French , it ' s easy to see how cringy it might ' ve been . And in any case , the Royal Navy took the name Enterprise from the French ship L ' Enterprise . So ? Picard gets an out here because Enterprise is a legacy starship name and holds more anchor in the established universe . We ' re not talking about what things are ITT . We ' re talking about what they appear to be . Maybe if we hadn ' t have had Kirk before , your point would hold more water . <| sep |> You already have an answer , but I wanted to tag this on . With Coffeescript , you pretty much can ' t define a function and then call it in your HTML . This is pretty much the whole reason I ' ve stopped using Coffeescript . My suggestion is to either do as that SO comment suggested and use a jQuery bind statement , or write that function in your HAML doc as standard JS rather than Coffeescript .