Voyage

Photo provided by Albert Bridge

 Voyage such a interesting and old word. Whenever I hear it it reminds me of the intro from Star Trek: "Space- the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Star Ship Enterprise, it's mission.... to boldly go where no one has gone before!" Pretty epic stuff when you're a kid, actually, to anyone living in the 1980's especially my dad, who in very geeky fashion loved this show.

Based on this intro I could formulate an idea of what a voyage meant to me: travel. A voyage was just another word for traveling to some foreign place, which is similar to the dictionary version. According to Webster's Dictionary the word voyage means a long journey, usually over sea (Webster's Dictionary, 1994). This is interesting as I didn't know a voyage required a certain time limit or had to be by sea. But it makes sense when thinking about when the word was created, I don't know the exact date but I do know that they were using it in the 1900's when they were sailing the world, to find new lands. Based on that it makes perfect sense that a voyage would be long because it would take months to get to another continent on an old sail ship and that you would definitely be traveling by sea since there wasn't any other options at the time.

These days newer dictionaries have also made a voyage applicable to land, space or air travel. For example, the online Dictionary.com allows for voyage to be explained in a number of ways, but basically says that a voyage is a journey to a foreign or distant place either by land, sea, air or space (Definition of Voyage, 2012). I think this definition is a little more appropriate for today, I'm sure NASA would also agree.

But there you have it, the definition of voyage, I guess I could say I voyaged to Southeast Asia since I flew there by plane (17 hour flight by the way) and explored it for about three months before coming back to Canada. To voyage is much different than to just travel because when you are on a voyage you actually immerse yourself into the culture of a foreign place and I love it! Some day I hope to voyage to another foreign place I've never been, hopefully sooner rather than later.

References

Webster's Dictionary. (1994). USA: Webster's Dictionary.

Definition of Voyage. (2012). Retrieved June 13, 2012, from Dictionary.com: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/voyage