Etymology from the land of giants and jousting
The phrase ‘tilting at windmills’ is often said to ‘come from’ Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In fact, the phrase never appears there, but it does refer to the title character’s strange belief that windmills are giants… "with their long arms. Some of them have arms well nigh two leagues in length” that he must fight.
Tilting, for those who are wondering, means ‘jousting with lances’, and the phrase has come to simply meaning ‘fighting an imaginary enemy’.
It was first used in reference to Don Quixote 40 years after the novel was published, in The Character of a London Diurnall in 1644, where John Cleveland wrote "The Quixotes of this Age fight with the Wind-mills of their owne Heads." But the phrase as we know it today is first used in April 1870 in the New York Times, which reported that the Western Republicans “have not thus far had sufficient of an organization behind them to make their opposition to the Committee’s bill anything more than tilting at windmills.”
If you’d like to tilt at a windmill, or perhaps just enjoy a spring walk to a windmill, do read our Outing feature from page 60 of the March issue.
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