Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

A couple of words come from last week's post: hobo and ephemeral.It is the nature of their passing along that unites them.

A hobo is a class of homeless, traveling man. The origin of the word is unknown, except that it seems to have come into vogue in California in the 1890s. There are a number of conjectures for its etymology, Etymonline.com quotes Barnhart comparing it to an early 19th century English word, hawbuck, which referred to a "clumsy fellow, country bumpkin." It may have come from trainmen calling out "ho, boy" to those using rail cars illegally. Or it could have come from "hoe-boy" meaning a farmhand.

H.L. Mencken, in his monumental work "The American Language" (Supplement 2, p. 679), writes that the first use of the word hobo is in a magazine article by Josiah Flynt dated 1891, but doesn't give the magazine's name. He quotes the Dictionary of American English as positing that it comes from "Hello Beau," or "Ho, beau." Another suggestion he gives (my favorite) is that it comes from homus bonum, meaning a good fellow. But he concludes by saying that all of the suggestions sound improbable to him. So more ideas, but nothing definite.

My dictionary defines a hobo as a tramp or vagrant, but those who call themselves hobo would make a distinction between the three. They would suggest a tramp is one who will only work when they need to and a vagrant as one who will never work, while a hobo works to support their lifestyle as a vagabond, the original American migrant worker. It was the depression in the 1930s that increased the hobo population dramatically. They would "ride the rails" from town to town, setting up "hobo camps" and even developed a literature that included poetry.

If you want to learn more about the history of the hobo and "hobohemia," a trip to Britt, Iowa is de rigueur. It hosts a hobo convention every year (this year's is August 3-9); for more information you can go to http://www.brittiowa.com/hobo/.


Ephemeral is a much older word. It means lasting a very short time, and is very similar to transitory. But the difference is in the potential continued existence of something that is transitory while that which is ephemeral has a sense of ceasing to exist in a very short time.

Ephemeral came to English in the 1560s and was originally used only of diseases and lifespans. It wasn't until the 1630s that it expanded to anything that would quickly cease to exist. According to dictionary.com a second definition is for something that lasts only one day, giving an example of "an ephemeral flower."

Ephemeral is formed from making an adjective of the noun ephemera, which took place after ephemera had been in English for over a century (it came into English in the late 1300s.) The word ephemera comes from the Medieval Latin word ephemera that referred to a fever that would last but one day. Ephemera comes from the Greek word ephemeros that means daily or just for the day. The Greek word was formed by combining the Greek word for "on" (epi-) with the word for "day" (hemera). But it was a while before ephemera developed the broader application to anything that quickly ceases to exist; it wasn't until 1751 that this meaning is first recorded.

By the way, I read that due to the increased speed of rail transportation the life of the hobo has become much more dangerous and the population of hobos has dwindled. It might even be called ephemeral.