solivagant

If you’re a solivagant, it means you like wandering alone (with or without a cloud). It’s also an adjective (AKA a describing word) – so you can be a solivagant while taking a solivagant walk. The etymology is fairly straightforward: it’s from the Latin words sōlus for ‘alone’, and vagō which means ‘to wander’. And it has the suffix ‘ant’ at the end, which we use to form nouns of agency (a fancy way of saying people or things that do an action) and adjectives that describe a state or quality.

Tod Sloan (on the right), before it all went tits up – at least he has a pal in this picture (photo from Wikipedia)

If you like wandering at night (which obviously you can only really do if you’re a man, sadly), you’re a noctivagant.

Perhaps because writers are generally quite solitary creatures (and always cold, if you’re me), English has lots of words and phrases for being on your tod. In fact, there’s one right there – ‘on your tod’ is a shortening of the (weirdly posh) Cockney rhyming slang phrase ‘on one’s Tod Sloan’. Tod Sloan was a world-famous American horse jockey who lost all his money and died penniless and alone (sad face).

Other lonely words you might not have come across before include:

• solitudinarian: this one’s pretty obvious – someone who leads a solitary or secluded life

• anchorite: a man who keeps himself to himself for religious reasons (like a hermit). If you’re a lonely religious lady, you’re an anchoress. This comes from the Late Latin word (I’m not sure why it wasn’t on time) anachoreta, which can be traced to the Greek anachōrein, meaning ‘to withdraw’

• eremite: another type of religious hermit (turns out religion is a lonely biz). This word comes from the Greek erēmitēs which means ‘living in the desert’.

In case my solitary words have left you feeling a bit depressed, here’s (a very un-PC/sweary) puppet version of Kim Jong-il singing about feeling alone in the world because no one’s as great as he is.

carceral

Carceral is an adjective meaning of, or relating to, jails or prisons. The sharp-eyed among you have probably already realised that it shares its roots with ‘incarcerate’ (i.e. put in prison). Both of these come from the Latin word for prison, ‘carcer’. And that comes from ‘karkros’, a Proto-Italic word for ‘enclosure’ or ‘barrier’. In case you’re wondering ‘Proto-Italic’ languages are the ancestors of the Italic languages, spoken on the Italian Peninsula in the first millennium BC. So well old, then.

There are lots of other slang words for prison and going to jail. Here are just a few I found.

Slammer

This one didn’t appear until the 1950s in the US of A. It’s pretty straightfoward – it refers to doors being closed noisily behind you.

Clink

Possibly from the sound of the blacksmith’s hammer closing the irons around the wrists or ankles of prisoners. There was also a prison called the Clink in Southwark which goes all the way back to 1129 (and is now the site of The Clink prison museum, where my sister and I once spent a memorable afternoon – there are A LOT of awesome photo opportunities in there). It might also have been influenced by the Flemish word ‘klink’ meaning ‘latch’.

Doing bird

Cockney rhyming slang for ‘birdlime’ which translates to ‘doing time’. This is probably because birdlime is horrible sticky stuff spread on twigs to trap small birds by utter bastards (thankfully banned in most places now).

Pokey

This first appeared in the early 20th century, although no one knows its exact origins. It might come from ‘pogey’, a 19th-century English slang word for poorhouse.

Pen

This is short for ‘penitentiary’, which has been around since the early fifteenth century. Then it meant a ‘place of punishment for offenses against the church’, from the Medieval Latin ‘peniteniaria’ meaning ‘of penance’. The slang term ‘pen’ first appeared in 1884.

In other prison news, England and Wales have the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe, locking up 149 people for every 100,000 of the population. Yay us. And apparently old people are getting naughtier – between 2002 and 2015, the number of prisoners aged 60 and over rose by 164%.

If all that’s left you feeling a bit depressed, here’s Johnny Depp in a parody of Jailhouse Rock in John Water’s stone-cold classic ‘Cry Baby’. If you haven’t seen it, I suggest you watch it immediately – alongside JD, it also has Iggy Pop and Ricki Lake in it, for crying out loud.