A few reflections.
All my posts this season are “inspired by” a letter of the alphabet!

Overseas is an interesting word in English. It is used to describe travelling to another country, but if you are in Europe and you travel from Spain to Italy, let’s say, we would not say overseas. We may just say abroad, (al extranjero in Spanish.) Overseas tends to be used when we talk about a longer journey, or when someone is living in a distant land. But basically travelling anywhere from the UK is overseas as you have to cross the sea to get anywhere. So I’m thinking it’s probably only a term or indeed a concept used for English-speaking island inhabitants, as for example, the UK, New Zealand or Australia. Which brings me to consider terminolgy.

To begin with, when we talk about overseas students, who for example go to the UK to study, they would most likely be called international students in any other country. And the term foreign student may be seen nowadays as a little pejorative, given that the word foreign suggests an outsider, not one of us! To my mind, describing someone as a foreigner smacks a little of xenophobia. Really, it shouldn’t, as the word comes from the idea of something which is outside, though even that suggests other than. You can see the same root of foreign in the Spanish fuera (outside) or forastero (a stranger).

And then we have another one. The word abroad is more commonly used to describe travel to another country. We have the meaning of broad, a wide area, out in the open. So going abroad is widening your physical sphere. A less common use of the word just means to be away from home, outside or out. Think 18th century, the lady of the house is abroad and won’t be back until tea time. It can also mean widely known, there are stories abroad that she is going to win the prize. But I digress.

So those are some of the terms we use to describe travel and places which are not our homeland as well as people from those places. So why do we travel? Well, humans always have. In order to survive, our ancestors needed to travel to find food, a place to settle. To satisfy their curiosity for what was beyond their shores, explorers set out on voyages of discovery, which admittedly would often be more to the benefit of those “discovering” than those “discovered”. In search of a better life, people may emigrate to another country by choice, or be forced to leave their home, through no fault of their own, as refugees. Travel for pleasure, however, is a relatively new concept. The beginnings of tourism as we know it were perhaps seen in the idea of the Grand Tour, when the English would travel to Europe, famously Italy, (see the E.M. Forster novel A Room with a View!) This was when aristocratic or well-to-do families would send their children to be educated or soak up the culture and art of the old continent, principally in Greece and Italy, dating from the end of the 17th century, and continuing right up to the 19th.

So travelling, going overseas, abroad or to foreign parts, whether for pleasure, necessity or a desire to discover, is something which we have always done. What I feel is important to remember is that this free movement of people has created a multi-cultural society, one all the richer for being so, in my opinion. Travel does not only broaden the mind for the traveller, but also for those who welcome the traveller into their own microcosm. We are all citizens of the world that we share, we have all come from somewhere else if you look back far enough, and xenophobia, be it overt or slipped into the terminology we choose to employ, has no place in it.

On that note, a happy festive season to all (if indeed you celebrate one.) Espanglisher will be back in January.

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O is For…