In some of my less reasonable notions about how to spend my retirement years, I think that we’d like to get a van and tour, living cheaply, while we explored the country. (I read the book Blue Highways at an impressionable age.)
There’s a #VanLife subculture for this, although my impression is that’s more for younger people and has a kind of Instagram vibe to it. However, a couple of weeks ago I ran across a term that’s probably a better description of what we’d do: workampers.
Workampers are people who work + camp. They live a nomadic life in their vans or RVs (or even tents, I guess), working part time to support that lifestyle. A lot of the work is seasonal, which is fine for people who are not tied to a location anyway. And many workampers are retired folks, just like how I’d imagined.
The idea of being a workamper sounds sort of appealing from the perspective of sitting in a nice two-bedroom condo while still working full time. All that freedom! But it’s wise of me to read about the workamping life, because when you focus on the details, there are some hiccups. The work part of workamping usually involves hard or boring jobs (or both) for low wages. Life inside an RV is pretty darned tight, let alone squeezing down even more into a van. Running an RV is not necessarily cheap. And living in a campground is probably a lot less, you know, luxurious than living in a cozy condo or even a nice motel room. One benefit, however, is that we might be able to take the cats.
So for the time being, I’m happy just to know the word workamper. Whether I ever become one … we’ll see.
For origins, a little something to mess with your intuition. Greyhounds are named that because they are … what? If you (and most of the English-speaking world, I’d bet) said “because they’re gray” (or “grey” in some versions), your instincts would seem sound. But you’d be wrong.
It seems that the grey- part of greyhound is a very old word that means, well, “dog.” Or perhaps more precisely, it means “bitch,” as in female dog. There was a word greyhundr in Old Icelandic that meant female dog; Old Icelandic is a relative of Old Norse, which was spoken in the northern part of England after the Vikings made themselves at home there starting around 800 AD. There is an instance of grighund in Old English, and sometimes that -g- turned to -y-.
Naturally, a lot of people assumed that the first part must have referred to the color. The word also occasionally showed up with grew- as the prefix, because other people thought that the dog had come from Greece; grew is an obsolete word that meant “Greek.” Either way, the interpretations are again an example of folk etymology, where speakers touch up an unusual word so that it fits more understandably into their native language.
Many of the citations for greyhound in the OED refer to hares, so it’s pretty clear why people kept greyhounds, even if they were—like us—not so clear on where the name had come from.
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