Wednesday's Random Slang-o-rama: Hobo

 A dear friend* suggested I tackle the word hobo for Slang-o-rama. Sounded good to me! The first thing I did was to search and see if I'd dealt with this word in the past. Turns out, hobo has appeared only once in all the many years my Silver Rush blog has been around: in 2009, when I was busy talking up the third book in my series, Leaden Skies, in this post about winter travel to Leadville in 1879.

So, let's give hobo the Slang-o-rama treatment....

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According to Online Etymology Dictionary (OED), hobo, meaning "a tramp," originated about 1889 in the U.S. West and is of unknown origin. The dictionary offered these possibilities:

Barnhart compares early 19c. English dialectal hawbuck "lout, clumsy fellow, country bumpkin." Or possibly from ho, boy, a workers' call on late 19c. western U.S. railroads.

I turned to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang by J.E. Lighter, and ho, boy, there's a looong entry for hobo, also with "origin unknown," adding that one plausible etymological suggestion is hoe-boy, "a hoehand," although it's not recorded by lexicographers. The Washington Post has a nice piece titled Where did the word 'hobo' come from? The article mentions the International Convention of Hoboes and notes that hobos were once such a big deal that they even had hobo colleges and a hobo newspaper.

Wow. So, one could get a degree in being a hobo? I wonder if there were advanced degrees as well...

Did hobo journalists go to hobo college? Hmmmm.
By Likely James Eads How - Hobo News 1918 or 1919, from the National Archives
eproduced in The damndest radical By Roger A. Bruns , Public Domain, Link

* A tip o' the hat to good friend and author Camille Minichino, for this Slang-o-rama suggestion.