I had also heard that it was a portmanteau of “homeward bound,” from being a migrant/vagrant. It is also proposed as one of the possible etymologies on Wikipedia at Hobo - Wikipedia (citing Bryson’s “Made in America” as a source).
The meaning of the illustration eludes me. A hobo jumping on a woman’s back?
I wonder if the original column didn’t have two questions and the woman is from the other one. That is a pretty short question and answer.
Uh, I could be wrong, but do you guys forget that a woman of ill repute is called a ho?
So the Ho “boy” is is serving the “ho” and he is not stepping on her, but doing a Thai foot massage.
From the Word Detective:
First off–that Wikipedia article is terrible. It doesn’t address the current state-of-the-art research on the word hobo.
Citing Bryson is useless. He’s a good writer, terrible etymologist.
There has never been any serious evidence that it’s from “homeword bound.”
The idea that railroad workers greeted each other with “Ho, boy” is totally unfounded.
Here’s the latest and probably the correct answer.
The term first appears in print in 1885. From 2-3 cites in that time frame, it is proposed that the term “ho bo” was a cry of greeting between these knights of the road. This is the concensus of the American Dialect Society Mailing List.
I heard on NPR that it was short for Hoe- Boy. As in, boy with a hoe. Indeed referring to migrant workers that would carry a hoe with them as that was one tool that could easily be got and looked after and transported along to the next field of labor. Different than a bum, a ho-bo was willing to work instead of beg for handouts.
This has been discarded by most etymologists as a source.
Hmm, after perusing the thread, I thought of checking the Ngram viewer, smoothing turned off.
Interesting, but it appears the vast majority of results are false positives. “Hoboken” being one major one.
Powers &8^]
Wouldn’t Hoboken always be capitalized?
Our dumb animals: Volumes 68-71
Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals - 1835 -
http://www.google.com/search?q="hobo"&tbs=bks:1,cdr:1,cd_min:1818,cd_max:1846&lr=lang_en
FXMastermind, this is a dating error by Google Books. The quoted passage is from the 20th century.
That makes sense.
1935, to be exact. The Massachusetts SPCA was founded in 1868.
True, I forgot that the Google Books search is non-case-sensitive even though ngrams is case-sensitive. Regardless, it still appears that most of those early results are false positives.
Powers &8^]
So, it’s still a mystery?
Not if you go back and read my post(#6) and the links.
Obo!
Actually a hobo traditionally has not been a migrant worker. There are three levels on the lowerarchy relating to mobility and work. 1. Bums stay in the same place and don’t work. 2. Hobos move around and don’t work. 3. Tramps move around and work i.e. migrants. This distinction still holds today. There are hobo jungles and migrant laborers routinely call each other tramps. One would never refer to someone who worked as a migrant a hobo.