Travellers - if you've never come across "traveller" used as a term of abuse Dave Oesterreich, you can't be living in England.

Anyway here is a short dissertation about it, since several people have indicated they aren't sure what it means.

The term came into wider use in a formal way back in the sixties, for two reasons.

The first reason is because it is useful general term to include a wide range of people. "Gypsies" historically is a term that only really applies to Romanies/Roma, who are the descendants of people who left North India many hundred years ago. While many of them have continued to keep on the move, in some places they have settled down and still stayed distinct from their neighbours.

But not all "Gypsies" are on the move; and by no means all people who have a travelling way of life are Romanies. In particular in Ireland and in Scotland there have been wandering groups of people with other origins, often called tinkers, because of traditional skills in mending cans and so forth.

And there have also been at all times people who have had to take to the road because of things that have happened in their lives - that especially happened in Ireland an Scotland with evictions.

And all these different people with all their different origins have at times intermingled, and you get people who are partly from one origin and partly from another. The word didacoi has been used for people who are partly Romany, and partly not, or who have a Romany way of life but aren't from Romany families.

So the word "traveller" was a word which referred to the way of life, rather than to the ethnic origin. And it is a way of countering the many people - including the present Home Secretary of England, Jack Straw - who have gone in for the "these aren't real Romanies - they are just Didacoi" sort of argument.

And the other thing about the word has been that all the other words - Gypsy, Tinker, Didacoi, and many more, have been used as insults, and still are so used.

But since there is still prejudice and hostility towards the people involved, inevitably the word "traveller" has now become used in a hostile sense as well. It's commonplace to see pubs with signs "No Travellers."

And what has confused matters more is that there was the phenomenon of "New Age Travellers", which was the term used for hippie type ex-housedwellers who took to the road in beat up, (and often beautifully decorated) vehicles, trying to run or attend free festivals and so forth. And these were joined by other people for whom a life on the road seemed a better option than staying-on in some squalid run down part of the city. And they came in for some vicious persecution and harassment, and the press always reported in terms of "Traveller convoys".

So the term Traveller is now a thoroughly confused one, because sometimes when people use it they mean specifically "New Age Travellers", and sometimes they mean just Gypsies, and sometime they use it to mean any and all of them.

And some traditional travellers don't like being associated with the post-hippies and so forth, because it means they find themselves up against two lots of prejudice at once, so they don't like the term.