Ten years later, James Thacher said in his writings on the American Civil War, the indisposition had been called “by Dr Cullen nostalgia, or home sickness”.

The word’s meaning has been expanded over the years.

From my point of view, I often wondered what happened to the kids from my class at school.

Some I have heard about, such as the girl who starred in the television show Prisoner and finished up in court on a serious charge a few weeks ago, or the woman we all complained about in the sports department at the Newcastle Herald because she talked too much.

But I have often wondered about the boy from Newcastle Boys’ High who was set to become a Catholic priest, or the boy who was brilliant in his studies, but could not read a word out aloud (“he can’t read sir”) or the girl at Quirindi High I used to call Boots only to annoy her. We have probably crossed paths many times over the years without realising.

Nostalgia is one of those words that occupied the minds of medicos for many years in the 18th century. “I hope I have treated his nostalgia successfully,” said one.

I can’t imagine many people would go to the doctor’s these days and say, “I have a bad case of nostalgia. Do I need an operation?”

Nostalgia used to refer only to a place and it meant a longing to return home, or a form of melancholia caused by prolonged absence from one’s home.

These days we call it home sickness.

I believe Swiss physician Johannes Hofer coined the term in 1688, from the Greek ­nostos, or homecoming, and algos, or pain.

As the years wore on, nostalgia referred not only to a place but to conditions, such as school days. Reader’s Digest has a sentence that says “the old man looked back with ­nostalgia on the days of his youth”.

Eric Partridge in his Guide to Good English says nostalgia means home sickness in acute form, “verging on the psychopathic”. He goes on to say that the word’s origins could find this meaning “classed as archaic”.

A correspondent in The Times Literacy Supplement commented on October 6, 1945, that the word meant “a painful desire to return home”.

That was the original meaning.

In 1943, John Marquand in his novel So Little Time said the word had been worked to death. It had been applied to dresses, perfumes, furniture and even ­saddle horses.

These days the word’s meaning has been expanded. I haven’t heard it used for dresses, perfumes, furniture or saddle horses, but I accept Mr Marquand’s word.

I have, however, heard it used in the context of “the good old days”. Were they so good? Well, that’s up to the individual to decide.

But I often wonder if that boy from Newcastle became a Catholic priest or if that girl from Quirindi married a shopkeeper wearing thongs and had 10 kids.

That to me is what nostalgia is all about.

I am supported by Stephen Murray-Smith, who says in Right Words: “The word has been used for so long and so widely to mean a longing for something experienced in the past that to insist on a narrower meaning is useless and silly.”

lauriebarber.com lbword@midcoast.com.au.