March 17, 2021: While Jessie Roams the Earth -

I was struck by a testimonial from one Jessie F., who wrote, of a particular nightshirt, “As long as I roam the earth, I will never wear anything else.”

I was struck in two different ways, one of them linguistic. “Roam the earth” seemed to me to be an unusual choice of phrase. What comes to your mind when you think about something(s) or someone(s) roaming the earth? I know what comes to mine.

But while we wait for your answer, a moment on Jessie, who swears she will never wear anything but this favorite nightshirt, as long as she roams the earth. I think from her testimonial we can safely conclude that:

• Jessie likes her nightshirt
• Jessie fancies hyperbole

And, possibly,

• Jessie despairs of ever going out in public again

Take heart, Jessie! Unless you are terminal and confined to bed from here on out, I really believe you WILL again wear “day clothes.”  I believe that we as a society will even come to agree that wearing a nightshirt in public is not optimal. I can’t prove this is true, but that’s my bet, and I’m sticking to it!

So now, back to “roam the earth,” the interesting part (okay, interesting to me). One of my very happiest places is the Corpus ofContemporary American English, which I may have mentioned before. If you want to see how Americans are using language (not how they ought to – COCA is the opposite of the grammar police), you can search the corpus of more than 1.1 billion words, and marvel at the results.

I went in and searched for words that preceded “roamed,” “roam,” or “roams the earth.”   

Past tense: Dinosaurs, by a wide margin.  If you are talking about things that used to roam the earth, it’s generally dinosaurs, followed at a distance by Giants, Cavemen, Mastodons, Neanderthals, and suchlike.  There’s also a smattering of joke usages, hearkening back to the olden days when other “extinct” things, like Typewriters, and Corvairs, still roamed the earth.

Present tense, plural:  Dinosaurs, by a wide margin. (I think this may be from sentences like, “Imagine you are living in the Mesozoic era, and dinosaurs still roam the earth.”) There are more joke versions here, including Zombies, Lawyers, and the Unbaptized.

Present tense, singular:  the Devil, Pride, and a “creature” that on closer examination is a “manbearpig.”

I think things that roam the earth (or did once) tend to be either big and heavy, or pretty unsettling (Zombies, the Devil), or both. Spiders are, even as we speak, doing their spider thing all over the place, right? But do we say that spiders roam the earth? Nope. Too light. Weasels don’t roam the earth. Too small. Birds? Too airborne. “Roam the earth” has a whole lot of what linguists call “semantic prosody,” and I think it’s large, heavy, negative, threatening, or intimidating, unless it’s (nearly) extinct, like Typewriters (also heavy!) and Corvairs.

And so I say to Jessie, who I imagine to be young, slightly depressed, and otherwise in the bloom of health: You didn’t gain that much weight during the pandemic! You will get dressed someday, and you will fit into your old jeans – maybe not at first, but eventually. It’s going to be a few more months, maybe, but it’s going to happen.