What does this phrase mean? I have seen it several time on these boards and even when I look at it in the context in which it is used, I have no idea what it means.
It’s from Don Quixote, a Spanish literary work by Miguel de Cervantes. Don Quixote was a nearsighted knight, who frequently mistook windmills for monsters or somesuch, and would attack them, to the amusement of his companion, Sancho Panza. The phrase “tilting at windmills” has come to mean rallying to any silly or useless crusade or cause.
It means “to attack or direct your energies towards a non-existent threat”. My dictionary says that windmill can mean “an imaginary opponent or evil, esp in the phrase ‘tilt at or fight windmills’”.
Thank you.
Thanks Q.E.D. - I wasn’t aware of the origin of the phrase.
It’s a reference which means trying to do something which you can’t possibly hope to achieve. It’s from the book Don Quixote.
As far as I recall, he had high faluting ideas of wanting to be a heroic knight and on his travels he first saw windmills.
He thought they were giants or monsters or something like that and so he tried to attack them, but got knocked over by the blades of the windmill.
Tilting, in this context means jousting, I think.
Is Don Quixote worth reading? I thought it was about a guy with a big nose. The one they remade in the film Roxanne.
Oh hell. Nevermind. I just realized what I was trying to talk about. Disregard, please.
You’re thinking of Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand.
To be specific, it comes from this bit of the novel.
To add a bit of not-extraordinarily-relevant info, is there a scene in the musical ‘man of la mancha’ with quixote charging at a windmill that he thinks is an ogre? Towards the beginning maybe.
Along these lines, it should be asked: Doesn’t the word, “quixotic”, have the connotation of being idealistic? How was Don Quiote idealistic? If he was near-sighted, then isn’t this usually associated with being short-sighted, more than ideal? - Jinx 
Quixote was idealistic because he chose to reimagine the world as a place where chivalry, knights, opportunities for heroism, etc still existed. The fact that he was short-sighted really has nothing to do with the origin of the phrase.
Oh, and yes, in the musical he does attempt to tilt with a windmill.
I’d always assumed “quixotic” meant pointless or fruitless. That makes more sense WRT the book. Audiobottle’s interpretation is interesting, though I’ve never heard “quixotic” to mean that.
A further small contribution on tilting.
Tilting is another way of referring to the combat technique of a mounted knight charging with his lance. Peace time contests of this technique, most often with blunted lances, are what we commonly call jousting today.
I suspect (my own speculation) that tilting may refer to the tilting of the lance from the upright orientation when at rest/beginning the charge to the levelled orientation prior to impact.
Any SCA member or medieval military historian care to correct me / ellaborate?
I bet you saw that in my pit thread. I wondered the very same thing.
Just from dictionary.com
quix·ot·ic ( P ) Pronunciation Key (kwk-stk) also quix·ot·i·cal (–kl)
adj.
Caught up in the romance of noble deeds and the pursuit of unreachable goals; idealistic without regard to practicality.
Capricious; impulsive: “At worst his scruples must have been quixotic, not malicious” (Louis Auchincloss).
So I suppose a combination of our definitions is probably more correct.
As far as tilting goes, I just happened to pick up some book detailing the history of swords and I recall reading that jousting became tilting after they put the barrier in the middle for safety. I don’t know what bearing this has on the name other than maybe the person has to tilt the lance over the barrier, but that’s completely a guess on my part.
Ah, it was from “By the Sword” by Richard Cohen.
And by using the search the book feature at Amazon, I see that he says the barrier was called the tilt and thus jousting became known as tilting.
He wasn’t near-sighted, more delusional. But in an idealistic fashion. It’s not that the windmills were big, fuzzy things that he mistakenly interpreted as giants because he was too far away from them. In his mind, they were giants.