Bohemian, a Word Fittingly Traced through Literature, Theater, and Intertwined Cultures

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. This is Brian, and I’m calling you from Laramie, Wyoming.

Hi, Brian and Laramie. What’s going on?

Well, the other day I was standing in a line, and there was a young lady in front of me who was interestingly dressed, and I happened to mention to her, only partially joking, that her outfit was very unique, all the way from her boots to her scarf. I said it all matched. And she fortunately was a humorous type person and thanked me. And we both chuckled. And I said, now we have to come up with an adjective to describe this. And I said, how would we describe it? And she and I both joked around and said, well, indie girl. And then I thought, well, avant-garde. And then I said, bohemian. And she said, what does that mean?

So I guess the younger folks don’t use that much anymore. Nobody seems to know where it is. You and I would know it’s part of Czechoslovakia next to Poland. But I wondered how the phrase bohemian for a radical political type would be used or how it came about.

Brian, so tell us more about how she was dressed. You said that everything matched, but what are we talking about? What kind of fabrics and colors?

Oh, gosh. It’s been a while, Grant. Let me think. Are we talking silks or furs or corduroys or flowing? I mean, was she dressed like a hippie or was it, did she look like an artist?

Yeah, an artist. There we go. There was no bedspread dress and it’s the middle of winter, so there were no Birkenstocks and Woolsocks. Oh, let me think. I imagine she might have had Doc Martens on. She had some style, though. Did she look like a current and modern?

Current, modern. She could have been in Gernitz Village. She could have been in West Los Angeles. Okay. Yeah. It was nothing bad. She looked good. She dressed up to be seen. She was dressed to be seen, yes. Okay. Yes. Okay.

The term bohemian comes from French. In France, the term La Boheme was applied to the Romani people, the folks who are also known as the Roman, the traditionally, yeah, the itinerant people who originated in northern India. And they were thought to have arrived in France in the 15th century via Bohemia, what is now the western part of the modern Czech Republic.

And in the early 19th century, this French word for bohemia, bohème, was applied to people who had similar characteristics or were perceived to have similar characteristics of sort of being on the edges, as you said, of society. And bohemian bohème came to apply to folks who were, you know, all about art and creativity and individual self-expression, sexual freedom, and maybe not living in traditional living arrangements.

And this became the subject of a lot of literature and music. There was an 1851 book called Scenes de la Vie de Bohème, or Scenes of Bohemian Life, which was about a group of people like that. And, of course, we have the opera by Puccini, La Bohème. And then the term Bohemian was also romanticized in the U.S. as well, you know, applying to poets and artists and writers and even journalists.

Even Mark Twain described himself as being of Bohemia. And did you ever see the play Rent or see the movie Rent?

Oh, I’ve heard of it, yes, but no, I never saw it. I never saw it.

Yeah, you might take a look at it. It came out in the mid-1990s, and there’s a show-stopping song in it called La Vie Boheme, and it’s got this scene where all these bohemian types are toasting to their, you know, to the way they lived and to their days of inspiration, playing hooky, making something out of nothing, the need to express, to communicate, to going against the grain.

They’re toasting all these things that are characteristic of the way that they live. And so it goes back to the French word for bohemia. How about that?

Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, thank you very much, folks.

Sure.

Brian, take care of yourself.

I shall. You folks, too.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

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