When I wrote The Newcomer’s Dictionary, I was interested in selecting words that described the newcomer and the newcomer experience from the English language, literature and history.

An assortment of words immediately came to mind: gypsy, nomad, immigrant, outsider, etc., and from this initial list, I began to add other words that were likely candidates. The word “transfer” was one of my early choices, as it was the ‘official’ word used in my childhood to describe our family’s corporate mandated moves. When I hear the word now, it still gives me a feeling of discomfort.

Since I have published the book, I still enjoy looking for words that might have been included. One word that recently got my attention was “outskirts”. Before I read the dictionary definition, I imagined it might have originated from some popular reference to women’s garments and layers of clothing, but its origin is much more literal.

The word comes from fifteenth century English combining the prefix “out-” with the noun “skirt”, which at the time meant “border” or “boundary”. It refers to the outer edges or fringes of a place, like a town or city and to those areas furthest from the center.

So “outskirt” is used to describe an area that is neither city or country. It is a physical place that exists between two distinct regions and is at a distance from the center. As I thought about it, the word seemed like a good metaphor for the newcomer experience, where we find ourselves neither living in the heart of a place (because we are new) but in some emotional outlying area as we adjust to our new home.

My nomadic upbringing meant that with every move we emotionally resided in the “outskirts”, which was someplace in the middle and at a distance from others. It wasn’t necessarily a bad place, and we didn’t aways stay there, but it just meant that we often viewed everyone and everything from a distance because we were trained by our circumstances to live in-between or on the “outskirts”.