Globetrotter – a fairly easily recognisable and common in different languages word, yet its meaning is not always correctly interpreted.
What could a globetrotter mean? Obviously it should stand for a man who is trotting the globe. As the first part globe, deriving from the classical Latin globus (something spherical) without a doubt defines the world/ the earth. And the second one trotter, which according to Du Cange’s Glossary of medieval and late Latin derives from the Medieval Latin word trotārius and refers to a horse that has been trained to trot in races.
Yet the word trotter has appeared into the English language 3 centuries before Du Cange’s glossary, which was published in 1678. In an Abbey of Durham accounts book from 1381 a trotter-saddle was mentioned among the inventory.
So when did the term trotter start to describe a person who moves about briskly and constantly? Apparently that took another two centuries and the new meaning of the word was born through university slang to on one hand refer to a tailor’s assistant who goes round for orders and on another to one who goes to university for a degree, without residence (the term-trotter). With both meaning paving a stable path through university slang, as for the latter, a description comes from 1782, Vicesimus Knox, Essays, moral and literary: “The majority are what are called term-trotters, that is, persons who only keep the terms for form-sake..to qualify them for degrees”. And the first has obviously as well kept its meaning for even longer, as a slang dictionary from 1860 describes a trotter as: a tailor’s man who goes round for orders in University.
The first time the word trotter appeared alone, in written, in the English language, in the meaning which is common today, was only back in the 19th century. In a Daily News article a traveller’s pattern was described as: “She was a Trotter..she trotted to and between the East and the West, with patterns to match—silks, stuffs, and so on.”
But nowadays, the term globetrotter is not, as some might suggest, universally equivalent to a world traveller. The word kept its relation to its roots and indeed describes a person who travels widely but one who has short time per location. A businessman who has meetings on 5 different continents per week is a globetrotter, but a typical Chinese tourist who could visit 20 different European countries for the same period and end up with thousands of pictures is one as well.
The first time the term globetrotter appeared in written in the English language comes from Daily News again, 1873, where the British traveller William Simpson discussed the presence of Europeans in China: “The Europeans there are only those belonging to the Legations and the missionary institutions, except an occasional ‘globe-trotter’”.
In terms of globe trotting, the world is divided to two, which can be best described by a 1976 Living in Step book: “Mr. Smith had never travelled outside the United States. Mrs. Smith was an inveterate globe trotter.”
