strollin' by charles mingus

The title is a deliberate misrepresentation. This entry has nothing to do with Charles Mingus, but everything to do with strolling, being a sequel to my last post about coddiwompling.

To coddiwomple means to travel in a determined fashion towards an indeterminate destination, and in conversation with a friend of equal abstraction, a few more words for walking began to seep into my frontal lobes. "Flaneur," for example, a word with provenance attributed to Baudelaire, meaning a person who saunters urbanely, a stroller at leisure. "Boulevardier" another French word, this time implying a socialite, strolling around town not for the purpose of seeing but in order to be seen presumably dressed in expensive finery.

This led to a more detailed examination of words in popular use to describe walking or walkers. The list below can't pretend to be exhaustive, but what came out of this casual anecdotal study is that no word is a precise synonym of another; they all hint at something slightly different, a bit like the claim, perhaps apocryphal, that Eskimos have a vast lexicon of terms to describe snow.

Here's a few, verbs and nouns mixed randomly:

Wanderer; pedestrian; wayfarer; tramp; nomad; promenade; peregrinate; roamer; rambler; ambler; hike; rover; trekker; cruiser; noctivagent; trudge; traipse; divagate; perambulate; potter; march; stride; travel; journey.

If anyone can add to this list, especially obscure and foreign words, I'd be delighted to hear.