Richard Thornton, the author, among others, of An American Glossary, quotes from the New York Evening Post (August, 1910): “It puzzles to have the country cousin clutch his arm and enquire whether that rough-looking customer coming out of a Chatham Square saloon is a dip, a yegg, a stall, a moll-buzzer, a Fagin, or a gun.” Those who think they know the origin of hobo may occupy themselves with yegg and the rest. A word for “migratory worker” must have been coined either by such workers (then it was a facetious or self-deprecating term) or by those who despised and persecuted them (then the term was derogatory). To complicate matters, it is American slang consequently, it need not be of English descent.
Hobo is slang, which makes the task of discovering its origin especially hard. Before we enjoy tramping the road that leads nowhere, I would like to make a few introductory remarks. Nowadays, it is enough to Google for “hobo: etymology,” to see some of the conjectures that have circulated for years. As usual, the word emerged suddenly, spread far and wide, and became the object of endless folk etymological speculation. The cruelest definition of hobo appeared in the 1893 edition of The Standard Dictionary (Funk and Wagnalls) and stayed in this reference work for decades: “An idle, shiftless wandering workman, ranking scarcely above the tramp.” However, in this case the ranking is important: hobos worked, tramps worked only when made to, while bums did not work at all (quite a hierarchy). Hobos were migratory workers in the western (perhaps, to be more precise, in the northwestern) parts of the United States. Only two things are “certain” and “known” about hobo: the word was noticed around 1890, and it emerged in American English. But this oversight by lexicographers is of little consequence, because our best dictionaries prefer to play safe and say only: “Origin unknown,” with an occasional variation: “Origin uncertain.” This variation means: “Several conjectures exist, but we cannot choose the best one.” “Origin unknown” leaves no hope whatsoever. As I expected, I discovered no revelations in my database, except for one reference that cannot be known to many. Follow him on Twitter at on Faceboo k.Last week I promised to look at my files and perhaps write about the origin of the word hobo.
#HOBO DEFINITION SERIES#
‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Hobo Blues’: Great Performances by John Lee Hookerīased in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Google Puts Online 10,000 Works of Street Art from Across the Globe You Could Soon Be Able to Text with 2,000 Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs
#HOBO DEFINITION HOW TO#
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#HOBO DEFINITION CODE#
The Hobo Ethical Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Living a Self-Reliant, Honest & Compassionate Life The hobo has gone, but the characteristically hardy hobo spirit finds a way to live on.
The line to modern urban graffiti almost draws itself, especially in the practice of subway-car “bombing” in 1970s and 80s New York. Take, for instance, the hobo practice of writing their nicknames, or “monikers,” on trains and elsewhere to show the world where they’d been and where they were headed. “The tall tales, the drawings, even the books” - especially volumes penned by “A-No.1,” the most famous hobo of them all - “were ways to project an image of themselves that both blew them up, but also kept them hidden.” Yet hobo ways, which encompassed even an ethical code that we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, have their descendants. “Hobos used their mythology as a kind of cover,” says hobo historian Bill Daniel.
“The truth is, there really isn’t any evidence that these signs were as widely used as the literature suggests.” Some of the abstracted symbols of the hobo code look a bit more like emoji: a locomotive meaning “good place to catch a train,” a building with a barred door meaning “this is a well-guarded house,” a cat meaning “a kind lady lives here.” But how much use did the hobo code actually see? “The problem is, all this information came from hobos, a group that took pride in their elusiveness and embellished storytelling,” says the Vox video’s narrator. Hashtags sounds a bit Millennial for hobo culture, but on some level the term does make sense. Hashtags signaled danger ahead, like bad water or an inhospitable town.” The code, written on brick walls, bases of water towers, or any other surface that didn’t move, “assigned circles and arrows for general directions like, where to find a meal or the best place to camp.
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