Pictured here are two scenes of yore depicting itinerant groups of people which you may think are very similar. How wrong you would be.

The top picture represents a group of gipsies whereas the lower one is of a group of bohemiennes. You can tell the difference quite easily: the gipsies are wearing lighter clothes, resting beneath a pleasant tree and have a number of charming young children, whereas the bohemiennes haven’t bothered to build a decent fireplace, have a number of scruffy urchins in tow and generally look as if they would steal your grandmother when you weren’t looking. Although why they would want to do that might be considered rather a mystery.

When it was discovered by Pereguine Droptabolik, the well known Oxford academic, that Gipsies (now often spelled gypsies) did not come from Egypt but in fact from India, they were naturally renamed Roma. Bohemian, as it is now spelled, no longer means itinerant but a socially unconventional, and consequentially degenerate, person.