The word has not always had a negative, vaguely condescending, even parasitic connotation. It has a beautiful etymological root:
“Tour” dates back to ancient Greek, “tornos,” a lathe for woodturning. That evolved in Latin and French as a verb, “tornare,” to circle about.
Humans being incessant wordsmiths, by the 1300s “tour” emerged as a description for traveling, a human lathe circling and shaping the wood of life.
People on the move at that time mainly were religious tourists, “pilgrims.” As Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” proves, they stayed at inns, bought food, clothes, trinkets, relics, flirted, partied, told tall tales.
But their Holy Grail was not a great restaurant — it really was the Holy Grail.
By the 1770s, “tourist” came to mean “one who makes a journey for pleasure, stopping here and there to see the sights,” no religious or other motive except literary; the term often suggested a travel writer. By the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville was a tourist who wrote “Democracy in America,” his amazing rumination about the young nation he orbited and observed.
Around that time a military term emerged, “tour of duty,” still far from any disparaging undertones. In 1903, when a French newspaper wanted to boost sales by staging a race, it created the “Tour de France” to evoke a grand bicycle journey.
The founder of modern, cookie-cutter tourism — clumps of people shepherded around to ensure a more predictable quasi-adventure — had already laid that groundwork by the century’s turn.
Thomas Cook organized members of a temperance society to ride a railroad around England in the mid-1800s, tickets and itinerary secured, considered the first group “tour.” He and his son expanded to offer trips as far away as the Holy Land and United States, his name surviving in the industry into this century.
This is when the pejorative grew. The great writer Graham Greene is credited with coining the term that captured changing implications in 1939: “Tourist trap,” echoing “mouse trap.”
Here’s irony: He first used it in a book called “The Lawless Roads,” his travelogue of Mexico, so he was a “tourist” in the older, de Tocqueville sense as he demeaned the collective experience.
We grapple with that tension to this day, in this place, this summer upon us. We apply anonymity to travelers. This is not true visitor by visitor, hotel room by hotel room, beach blanket by beach blanket, meal by meal, but does make it easier to depersonalize and even exploit visitors among us.
If we chose to describe them as “guests,” “celebrants,” “adventurers,” “explorers,” the whole relationship might be different. But it’s hard to see people lined up for fried clams with no bellies and think of them as “pilgrims,” “ambassadors,” or “seekers” — though some must be.
Instead they become “intruders,” “consumers,” more like prey to be “trapped,” money removed before release.
People have tried to shift this connotation with modifiers to make tourists focused, selective rather than an indistinct, lumpy stew. So here comes “ecotourism,” “adventure tourism,” “gastronomic tourism,” “cultural tourism,” “health tourism,” “gay tourism.”
All this is cool niche marketing. But it doesn’t remove the impersonal stigma.
That’s not gonna happen at a cultural level no matter how we might massage semantics.
But it does happen one by one, interaction by interaction, with a willingness to drop expectations, put aside entitlements that arise either from paying a lot of money to be here or by asserting status as part of the “real” year-round world.
I’ll try to remember this while avoiding restaurants because as Yogi Berra said, “Nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded.” I’ll recognize good people who have chosen to come here — of all places — for what they might aspire to be:
Lathes.
(A version of this essay aired June 30 on the Cape, Coast, and Islands National Public Radio stations. To hear the author’s dulcet rendition, visit WCAI's 'A Cape Cod Notebook')
https://sethrolbein.substack.com/welcome
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