Yesterday I met someone who did not know what the word 'vagabond' means. But then, he also did not know what the KGB was, or is. That's because he doesn't even remember the Cold War. That's because he was born in 1989. I found his youthyness actually heartening: wow, someone born so recently that they've reached adulthood and never felt the hideous, churning fear I associate with 'nuclear holocaust.'

I told this person what 'vagabond' meant, while inside I was thinking, as I often do, that I love words! I love words the same way someone once wrote, "I love yellow," the simplicity of his ardor thrilling me to my heart. I love the way words can be as slippery as numbers and equations are exact. So I was pleased some months ago to come across the Visual Thesaurus, which allows users to see a word visually (above), in relation to its synonyms. So I used it for 'vagabond' today.

Each word is clickable and draggable, creating new word maps, like the word-octopus above. In addition to the strange and compelling little wordopus from the Visual Thesaurus, here are some other definitions, uses and synonyms of vagabond.

Historically, "vagabond" was a British legal term similar to vagrant, deriving from the Latin for 'purposeless wandering'. Following the Peasants' Revolt, British constables were authorised under a 1383 statute to collar vagabonds and force them to show their means of support; if they could not, they were jailed. Under a 1495 statute, vagabonds could be sentenced to the stocks for three days and nights; in 1530, whipping was added. The assumption was that vagabonds were unlicensed beggars.

Vagabond, adj: aimless, destitute, down-and-out, drifting, errant, fancy-free, fly-by-night, footloose, idle, itinerant, itinerate, journeying, mendicant, migratory, moving, nomadic, perambulant, perambulatory, peripatetic, prodigal, rambling, roaming, rootless, roving, sauntering, shifting, shiftless, straggling, stray, strolling, transient, travelling, unsettled, wandering, wayfaring, wayward...

A person who leads an unsettled life; traveler

...bindle, black sheep, derelict, drifter, floater, gutterpup, guttersnipe, hobo, stiff*, tramp, transient, vagrant

* = informal/non-formal usage

Main Entry: vagabond
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: person who is idle, worthless
Synonyms: bad lot, black sheep, bum, loafer, ne'er-do-well, no-good, profligate, rapscallion, scalawag, scamp, tramp, waster, wastrel

And not forgetting...

"These vagabond shoes / Are longing to stray / And make a brand new start of it / New York, New York / I want to wake up in the city that never sleeps..."

The first time I heard the word vagabond may have been (no surprises) from the Bible, which my father read aloud daily at home. First mention is in Genesis chapter 4, verse 12, part of the curse God puts on Cain for murdering his brother, Abel:

When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

My first clear memory of the word came from a little old book on astronomy, in which comets were called, rather grandly, "Vagabonds of Space."