Do you like to go camping? If so, do you prefer tents or campers?
These days, much of our camping is for recreation and leisure, but I daresay none of us will be surprised to learn that it wasn’t always so. We’re aware of travelers and military making camp when they come to a halt for the day…but do you know where the word really comes from?
Camp has been in English since about 1520, coming to us via French, who in turn got the word from the Latin campus, which means… “a field.”
Originally these wide fields where people stopped to rest was used solely in a military sense–“where armies lodge temporarily.” It only took about 30 years, though, for non-military people to borrow the term. And because so many travelers had cause to camp for the night, plenty of words sprang up around it, like camp-stool in the 1790s, camp-meeting as a religious service that took place in a field (primarily Methodist) by 1809, and camp-followers for the people not military but who traveled with them, like washer-women and other service people, by 1810.
The metaphorical sense of “people adhering to a certain doctrine” is from the 1870s.
As for camping just for fun? That’s unique to modern times.
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Roseanna M. White is a bestselling, Christy Award winning author who has long claimed that words are the air she breathes. When not writing fiction, she’s homeschooling her two kids, editing, designing book covers, and pretending her house will clean itself. Roseanna is the author of a slew of historical novels that span several continents and thousands of years. Spies and war and mayhem always seem to find their way into her books…to offset her real life, which is blessedly ordinary.
Our family vacations when I was growing up always involved camping, and always in tents (though now that my parents are in their 70s and 80s, they have a small trailer instead). But we prefer camping among trees to camping in open fields 🙂