What does Coddiwomple even mean?

Names are important. Language works due to our shared agreement on what things are called. Once we name a concept, we can reference it without rebuilding the entire idea each time. The right word, universally understood, does the work of a paragraph.

I didn’t know before, and still don’t now, how to succinctly explain to people what I am doing. “I’m going travelling” functioned for colleagues and acquaintances to whom I didn’t care to explain further. The truth was deeper and required significant context before the gist was received by closer connections. For some, even after an extended conversation I gave up and let them keep their inaccurate ideas (my landlord insisted that when I return to London it should be in January because the job and housing market are good then).

I wasn’t helping the problem with my own lack of understanding. I am searching for something that could be intangible, metaphysical or internal and I definitely couldn’t articulate it yet. I desired freedom to go wherever I wanted and discover about myself but without scheduling a trip to Everest base camp or a meditation retreat in India. The idea to allow myself to change direction frequently until I found the belonging I yearned for is challenging and outside of my character.

This difficulty in reciprocal comprehension left me extremely frustrated at the lack of a singular word to title this chapter of my life.

I didn’t like journey or any of its attached synonyms. Journeys have defined beginnings and endings, they’re more tangible than what I was considering. They also come with the attached question “when will you know you’ve arrived?”

This wasn’t a temporary change.  Although I doubt I’ll roam forever, there is no returning home at the end of it.  The end of the journey should be my home but I have no idea what that looks like or how long it might take.

Wanderlust didn’t feel right either.  By and large I’m not a traveller, sure I was going to migrate to new areas but I don’t have a huge desire to discover the world as yet unexplored.

Every possible word lacked the focus and permanence yet directionless nature of what I was attempting. 

I raised the issue with my therapist (moaned about it for several minutes).  Her face lit up as she said, “I have the perfect word for what you describe! In fact it’s my favourite word in existence: Coddiwomple.” 

Ah, I thought, how clever of her; she’s created a nonsense word to demonstrate that my demand for labelling is getting in the way of psychological processing the emotional weight of leaving my current life.  

It was about 5 minutes later it dawned on me that she was being serious.  She proceeded to direct me to the below TED talk.

I don’t love all facets from that particular speech.  I’m not trying to live like Nancy, and I hope if when I describe my time I sound less lofty and smug.  However I can’t deny that the definition and sentiments met the criteria I wanted to find in a word.

Coddiwomple is a, largely, fictional English slang term meaning to travel in a purposeful manner towards a vague or unknown destination.  It emphasises enjoying the journey and embracing uncertainty over having a strict itinerary.

The etymology is unclear, it appears on travel blogs in the 2010s but no one person appears to claim credit for its creation.  Enough people wanted a shorthand for this particular concept and thus it organically birthed and permeated that subculture.

And yet I was immediately resistant to its use.  It took me a few weeks even to be able to remember it without seeing it written down.  I needed it spelled to me twice before I even could say it.  I’ve got a fairly sophisticated vocabulary, still my brain innately rejects this word. Pseudobelletristic sounds right to me, Coddiwomple doesn’t.

Something vaguely wrong in its syllabic construction; it feels like a portmanteau, but neither coddi nor womple are real words either.  It’s reminiscent of hearing a conversation in Arabic and all of a sudden they pronounce Google in a perfect English accent.  It’s the only word in existence that semantically satiates me within one sitting.

And so despite a month looking for Coddiwomple I began my quest to find an immediate replacement.  This was a language problem and the world recently got some very sophisticated help with language, so I showed the problem to my friend Claude.

Wayfaring, Odyssey, Pilgrimage, Expedition, Quest- can’t be any of these, they’re too targeted and imply I’ll be fighting through the jungle one month, sledding arctic tundra the next, maybe slay a medusa on the way.

Sojourn- makes it sound like I’m heading on a holiday.  The exact opposite of what I want to do.  It’s also temporary, I needed to relay the permanent nature of what I was undertaking

Maybe another language has this covered, we can add some mystique by making it sound exotic, like kaizen or schadenfreude.

Yeah very interesting, but not very helpful Claude.

We back and forthed my predicament for longer than any human would have tolerated.

Okay I’m really clutching at linguistic straws now.

It dawned on me the biggest problem I had with Coddiwomple.  It sounds silly.  I undertook this life change with the utmost seriousness.  It jarred with my sense of self-importance to have to adopt a name for post-transition that sounds infantile, old fashioned and weirdly English.  I didn’t want people to think I was doing something whimsical.  I don’t want people to laugh at me.

And with that realisation came the reluctant acceptance that I would have to embrace Coddiwomple’s usage with full force.  It’s awkward, confronts my self-seriousness, I feel slightly ashamed to say it even 6 months later.  

It’s perfect for disarming my lofty image of what I’m doing; it punctures grandiose ideas.  I’m not Ernest Hemingway or Jack Kerouac, those two definitely didn’t coddiwomple.  I can’t write a book or direct a film about my life called Coddiwomple.  

This is what a shocking amount of my ‘adventure’ looks like.

If you want to walk around with your head in the clouds then you need to keep your feet on the ground.  So I am coddiwompling (I shudder even more at the verb) and it’s not as important or profound as I dreamt it would be.  That’s okay.