The word “tourism” has not always had a negative, condescending 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.
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, flirted, told tall tales.
But their Holy Grail was not a great restaurant — it really was the Holy Grail.
By the 1770s, “tourist” meant “one who makes a journey for pleasure, stopping here and there to see the sights,” often suggesting 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.
A military term soon emerged, “tour of duty,” still far from disparaging undertones. In 1903, when a French newspaper wanted to boost sales, it created the “Tour de France” to evoke a grand bicycle journey.
The founder of modern tourism, Thomas Cook, organized members of a temperance society to ride a railroad around England in the mid-1800s, considered the first group “tour.” He expanded to offer trips around the world.
This is when the pejorative grew. The great writer Graham Greene coined the term that captured changing implications in 1939: “Tourist trap” was meant to echo “mouse trap.”
Here’s irony: He 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, applying anonymity and superficiality 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 visitors.
If we described them as “guests,” “celebrants,” “adventurers,” 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.
People have tried to make tourists look and feel proactive rather than lumpy, passive. So here comes “ecotourism,” “adventure tourism,” “gastronomic tourism,” “cultural tourism,” “health tourism,” “gay tourism.”
All this is cool niche marketing but doesn’t remove the impersonal stigma.
That’s not gonna happen at a cultural level no matter how we 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 aspire to be: human lathes shaping the wood of life.
