sojourner

 This is a lovely word which English acquired from the Norman French,  which the French in turn acquired from the Latin phrase sub diu meaning ‘for the day’ . Turn that into a verb and it becomes subdiunare meaning ‘to stay temporarily’.  In Italian this became soggiornare.

 The heyday of the sojourner in English was in the 1820s, so Google Ngram reveals. After that, it declined gradually until the 1940s but its frequency rose sharply after 2000.  I was puzzled by this because I thought of sojourner as a rare word these days but it turns out to be the name of the now famous robot, the Mars Sojourner.

 My interest was raised initially by the remark an historian made that immigrant labourers in Australia in the early 1900s were called ‘sojourners’ .  It is not quite as straightforward as that.  Sojourner is not a synonym for immigrant labourer. Rather it is a genteel or euphemistic way of referring to people that Australians did not want to stay in Australia. The Chinese, for example, who were largely men travelling alone and sending money back to their families in China, could be referred to rather loftily as ‘sojourners in our midst’.