It is grammatically correct and can be used in written English.
Examples: 1. "The old abandoned house was often visited by a drifter, who would pass through town on his travels." (Here, "drifter by" is used in the sense of someone who frequently passes by or drifts through a place.) 2. "As I walked along the beach, I spotted a lone drifter by the shoreline, lost in his thoughts." (Here, "drifter by" is used to describe someone who is wandering by or near a particular place.) 3. "The once successful businessman became a drifter by choice, leaving behind his material possessions and embarking on a life of simplicity." (In this example, "drifter by" is used to indicate a person's chosen lifestyle or occupation.).
In one bizarre episode, the three girls meet Ray, the drifter haunted by the lab monkey in his head, as he staggers down a trail carrying the scavenged corpse of an endangered bighorn sheep.
With some imagination, and a dozen extras, this could pass for the maritime hiring hall where Freddie Quell, a drifter played by Joaquin Phoenix, looked for work back in about 1951, before stumbling through the docks of San Francisco to his much stranger destiny in a movie that is expected to be called Clearly, Paul Thomas Anderson was here.
With some imagination, and a dozen extras, this could pass for the maritime hiring hall where Freddie Quell, a drifter played by Joaquin Phoenix, looked for work back in about 1951, before stumbling through the docks of San Francisco to his much stranger destiny in a movie that is expected to be called "The Master".
They were Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969, followed by the less fresh 1971 Support Your Local Gunfighter), in which he developed his contrary hero: "I make no secret," his drifter drawled, unimpressed by the wildness, or indeed the westernness, of a frontier town, "of the fact that I'm on my way to Australia".
Yes, he was an infallible superintelligent drifter, lusted after by every woman alive and able to defeat every single one of his enemies with one hand tied behind his back – kind of part Batman, part Bourne, part Littlest Hobo, part Robin Askwith from Confessions of a Window Cleaner – but this didn't really make him very accessible to audiences.
The relative isolation of South Orkney Islands is corroborated by drifter data, which reveal a northward flow of Weddell Sea water across the South Scotia Ridge between Elephant Island and the South Orkney Islands, acting as a dynamic barrier to exchange between populations at the Antarctic Peninsula and South Orkney Islands (Thompson et al. 2009; Thompson and Youngs 2013).
Officials said Adam was killed by a drifter and convicted serial killer who died in prison in 1996.
A few weeks before my planned departure, however, People magazine ran an article about a young woman abducted by a drifter while driving alone, and my mother, obsessed with the story, insisted that she accompany me to Ann Arbor.
