Where No Man Has Gone Before - Application of The Phrase

Application of The Phrase

A 1996 book written to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Star Trek is called Star Trek: These are the Voyages....

The quotation has also gained popularity outside Star Trek. The phrase has become a snowclone, a rhetorical device and type of word play in which one word within it is replaced while maintaining the overall structure. For example, an episode of Futurama that dealt with a character's devotion to Star Trek is named "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", a level in the videogame Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time is called "Starbase: Where No Turtle Has Gone Before", and an episode of DuckTales parodying Star Trek is entitled "Where No Duck Has Gone Before".

The phrase was referred to sarcastically on the retail box of the 1987 computer game Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter, sending its hero Roger Wilco on "His mission: to scrub dirty decks...to replace burned-out lightbulbs...TO BOLDLY GO WHERE NO MAN HAS SWEPT THE FLOOR!" (emphasis original), and similarly in 1992 regarding Apple's Mac 7.0 (code named "Star Trek") which was planned to run on the Intel chip by calling it "the OS that boldly goes where everyone else has been". Likewise on Babylon 5 Ivanova implies that a woman is promiscuous by telling the captain, "Congratulations. You're about to go where every man has gone before."

The split infinitive "to boldly go" has also been the subject of jokes. British humorist and science-fiction author Douglas Adams describes, in his series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the long-lost heroic age of the Galactic Empire, when bold adventurers dared "to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before." In The Physics of Star Trek, Lawrence M. Krauss begins a list of Star Trek's ten worst errors by quoting one of his colleagues who considers that their greatest mistake is "to split an infinitive every damn time."