Word of the day: Bohemian
As early as the 1500s there were groups of people in England who spoke their own language and lived nomadically, preferring not to settle in existing towns or villages. They looked a bit different from most people too; clearly they had come from somewhere else.
Possibly because these people didn’t know their origins themselves, everybody — including them — thought for some reason they were from Egypt. It’s quite possible that “Egypt” was simply a far-off place that people had actually heard of. For whatever reason, they were called “Egyptians” — which was shortened to “Gyptians,” and then shortened again to “Gypsies.”
Early references to these folks often suggest that they were distrusted, probably like most strangers: “It is ordayned agaynste people callynge themselves Egypcyans, that no such persons be suffred to come within this realme.” (1538)
The transformation of “Egyptians” to “Gypsies” didn’t take very long, at least in etymological time spans. By 1591 Edmund Spenser was using the term: “Or like a gipsen, or a Iuggeler.” It also didn’t take long for “gypsy” to acquire a figurative meaning — which of course has since completely eclipsed the original idea that gypsies were from Egypt (their language, Romany, is a variation of Hindi, which is probably a clue to their original location). By the early 1600s “gypsy” was being used to mean anyone who wandered around or generally behaved like everyone assumed Gypsies did; tricking people: “Oh this false Soule of Egypt!.. Like a right Gypsie, hath at fast and loose Beguil’d me.“ (Shakespeare, “Antony and Cleopatra”). Another early application comes from Robert Naunton;s 1641 “Fragmenta Regalia:” Beware of the Gipsey, meaning Liecester, for he will be too hard for you all.”
The people called Gypsies in England — or at least people who acted sort like them — were known in continental Europe as well. Nobody there really knew where they came from either, but in France the general idea was that maybe they had come from Egypt. Even if they had (they hadn’t), they came by way of Bohemia. Bohemia still exists; it makes up about half of the Czech Republic, and it’s the westernmost part — the closest to France.
The idea that the “Gypsies” had come to France by going through Bohemia makes no sense if they really started in Egypt (which is in another direction entirely), but it they came from where Hindi is spoken, Bohemia could reasonably have been in their path. Regardless of the geographical logic (or lack of it), in France the wandering people were called Bohemians.
English borrowed “Bohemian” in the 1500s, the same time “Gypsy” came into use. In fact, Shakespeare, who used “Gypsy” figuratively, also used “Bohemian:” “A Bohemian borne: But here nurst vp & bred.” (from “Measure for Measure”). But Shakespeare was talking about an actual Bohemian — either a French “Gypsy” or possibly somebody really from Bohemia — it was a physical place back then, too, after all.
Unlike “Gypsy,” “Bohemian” didn’t acquire a figurative meaning until much later. William Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair” marks the first recorded use of “Bohemian” that way: “She was of a wild, roving nature, inherited from father and mother, who were both Bohemians, by taste and circumstance.” “Vanity Fair” was an international best seller in 1848, and probably sparked much wider application of “Bohemian” to artists or writers who were unconventional in some way. The “Westminster Review” clarified this in 1862: “The term ‘Bohemian’ has come to be very commonly accepted in our day as the description of a certain kind of literary gipsey, no matter in what language he speaks, or what city he inhabits. A Bohemian is simply an artist or littérateur who, consciously or unconsciously, secedes from conventionality in life and art.” And that’s pretty much exactly what it still means today.
