
Evidence for these senses, sometimes extended to “Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here ,” go back to the 1980s, reportedly used in difficult legal or business contexts.īeam me up, Scotty can also reference technology that’s considered futuristic, as the article Beam me up, Scotty: The future of ablation, which appeared in the journal Science Translational Medicine suggests. That year, James Doohan, who played Scotty, titled his 1996 autobiography with the phrase, so intimately had it become associated with him.īeam me up, Scotty can be a way of literally saying “get me out of this place” or expressing rhetorical frustration with the world around you by expressing a desire for escape. The 1996 Star Trek novel, The Ashes of Eden, in part authored by William Shatner, was the first time the phrase appeared as such in the series franchise. Green finds Beam me up, Scotty as a slang term for a cocaine-based drug in the 1980s and as a way to say “Give me some, drugs!” in the 1990s, with getting high likened to getting beamed up. The catchphrase was recognizable enough that it appeared in a 1975 volume of office journals from the UK Royal Aeronautical Society.

Slang lexicographer Jonathon Green dates Beam me up, Scotty to US campus slang in the 1970s, when animated Star Trek was popular. Heard on ABC 4 Utah: Capt Kirk is coming to town! #ComicCon in Sept in Sandy Expo Center. The phrase Beam me up, Scotty is especially associated with Captain Kirk (played by William Shatner), the captain of the Starship Enterprise.

Requests for the chief engineer, Montgomery Scott, nicknamed “Scotty,” to beam up or beam down are common throughout the series.

In Star Trek, characters “beam” up and down from their ship to various planets by means of a teleporter. Beam me up, Scotty originates in the classic science fiction show Star Trek, although famously that exact wording was never uttered on the original 1960s show.
