the.com/bohemian
Someone who chose art over rent money and considers that a win.
means A person who lives an unconventional, artsy life, with little regard for the usual rules of money, career, or propriety.
from From the French 'bohémien,' originally meaning a Gypsy — because the French mistakenly believed Romani people had entered Europe through Bohemia (now part of the Czech Republic). The association with wandering, rule-flouting outsiders got transferred in 19th-century Paris to artists and writers living unconventionally on the fringes of respectable society — a sense popularized by Henri Murger's stories of Left Bank garret-dwellers, later immortalized in 'La Bohème.' So the word carries a double displacement: a misattributed homeland for Roma, then borrowed again to name penniless painters and poets.
- name origin
- French assumed Roma people came from Bohemia
- golden age
- 1830s Paris, broke painters and poets by choice
- modern remix
- now sold as a $400 fringe jacket
- queen song
- borrowed the word, kept none of the poverty