How did the term Bohemian come to be associated with literary and artistic nonconformists who live outside mainstream society? In the early 19th century, the French term La bohème was applied to the Romani people, also known as the Roma, a traditionally itinerant people who originated in Northern India, and who arrived in France via Bohemia, now part of the modern Czech Republic. The 1851 book Scènes de la vie de bohème or Scenes of Bohemian Life (Bookshop|Amazon) romanticized the life of an impoverished seamstress and her artist friends, and inspired Giacomo Puccini’s opera La bohème, which in turn helped inspire the modern musical RENT and its show-stopping number La vie bohème. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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