Much like old Bill Shakespeare, I have ‘small Latin and less Greek’ which may be why I only just learned a new word for walking. It’s solivagant, as noun meaning somebody who wanders wandering alone, or as an adjective describe the act of wandering alone, as in ‘I say, that solivigant over there is obviously on a solivigant journey.’It comes from the Latin solivagus, and I suppose I have might have teased out the meaning if given enough time but it was still a new one on me.
Evidently quite a lot of people know the world perfectly well. It’s the name of a band, a website, various bloggers, a teen novel, the title in one form or another of at least two movies, and no doubt much more besides.
Titles, I know, are hard, but it seems to me that titling anything with a word that a lot of people have never heard, may be a problem.
But the French like to have problems. The Commission for the Enrichment of the French Language (La Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française), is an institutions that tries to keep the French language pure and unsullied by non-French words, at least so far as official written and spoken communications are concerned. Borrowed English words trouble them especially.
As far back as 2006 they eschewed the word Walkman, and suggesting baladeur, which in fact became a general term for a portable music device, baladeur being a French word up there with flâneur and promenadeur, meaning a walker. See, the English language sometimes embraces foreign words. Of course Walkman was a trademark of Sony, which may have complicated matters.
But CELF is now fretting about the word podcast. This was already outlawed and changed to diffusion pour baladeur(broadcast for the walker) it has now become audio a la demande (audio on demand) which is OK but not very adventurous. I’d have liked audio pour la solivigant but I always want too much.
