Vagabond Nomad
If a nomad is a vagabond, how would you ever know it? I don’t mean a nomadic vagabond - a vagabond who is a nomad, like some kind of hobo character from our own culture, or the lone outlaw from pop culture’s imagination, like the High Plains Drifter. I mean a nomad who is a vagabond. Perhaps there is no such thing as a vagabond nomad, revealing how our settled culture is prejudiced towards viewing nomadic life as vagabond life, and mentally framing the vagabond as some kind of unemployed, bedraggled ne’er do well. Or, perhaps all nomads are vagabonds by definition - and dressed in bedraggled rags into the bargain. But without checking the dictionary definition of a “vagabond,” I do not feel that that is correct.
Nomadic life is not structure-less, wandering, un-rooted life. There is intent, pattern and regularity to their migration. agabondage suggests to me greater itinerancy and un-rootedness, hinting that a vagabond nomad is prone to lone migration, traveling alone without any of the group affiliations - family, tribe, or clan - that habitually give structure and stability to any human life. In particular, just as with settled culture, itinerant or unaffiliated lifestyles among young males can legitimately be called a greater threat to social order considering the record of young males for violence, emotional immaturity, lack of impulse control, wide-ranging, predatory sexuality, etc. Not that females are immune to these conditions. Indeed, individually females are more dangerous than males because they are more vicious, extreme, stubborn, begrudging and vengeful. But marginal behavior by females is more easily controlled by social affiliations than they are by males because females seem to adapt better and faster to the behaviorally muting effects of social life. (That does not mean that they cease to harbor extreme or marginal and convictions; perhaps only that they are more easily concealed.)