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Joined: Jul 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 3,467 |
>if you were wearing a shirt emblazoned with TEAT ...
Some years ago I was in a grocery store line and there was a quite-well-endowed young lady standing behind me wearing a t-shirt with very small letters across it, right at the nipple line. The letters read: Awfully damned nosy, aren't you?
TEd
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Joined: Jul 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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> Never have switched genders
So it wasn't you who starred in that movie about trans-sexuals: Been Her.
TEd
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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a t-shirt with very small letters across it, right at the nipple line.
Always did figure if you didn't want people reading your t-shirt you shouldn't have words on it.
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Joined: Jan 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
If a gal has two good reasons, she wears T shirt.
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old hand
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old hand
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Confusion reigns in the stales' household on this one due to creeping Americanisation.
The (40+ y.o.) parents use bum in the anatomical sense (as would most Oztrayuns of their vintage) whilst the chilluns (10 & 12) think first of the hobo connotations (as would most Oztrayuns of their vintage).
So....tell me about "hobo" - where'd that spring from? A slur on those from Hoboken (or however it's spelt) perhaps?
stales
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Unlike "bum," "hobo" is not necessarily derisive. While a bum is a shiftless person, a habitual loafer, a hobo is a vagrant or a migratory worker. My grandmother told me that hoboes were common during the Great Depression, when many, many displaced workers traveled with their few belongings from town to town, seeking available temporary work. They would often knock on her door, asking for employment, and she fed many a hungry hobo.
Per Webster's, "hobo" arises from a rhyming compound based on the greeting ho, beau. Origins A Short Etymological Dictionary of Modern English agrees: "...hobo represents ho! bo, ie ho! beau (for hello! beau), known to have been a tramps' formula of address in the 1880s and 1890s.
Charles Funk, in A Hog on Ice, observes this interesting relationship between bum and hobo:
One may be feeling "on the bum" when he's not OK physically. It is an American expression, dating back fifty years [ie, to 1907] or so. George Ade was the first to use it in print, but it comes from a dialectal English use of "bum," which for four hundred years has been a childish word for drink [!]. The American phrase thus first signified the condition one is in or the way one feels after overindulgence in drink.
But "on the bum" also means itinerant, living the life of a hobo. This second American use derives from a slang term which was current in San Francisco about a hundred years ago [ie, 1857], or during the gold rush. A "bummer" was a worthless loafer; later, during the the Civil War, a deserter who lived by raiding the countryside. Maybe the word was derived from the German Bummler, an idler, a loafer.
And how "bummer" came to mean a cause for disappointment or unhappiness...? Dictionary of Slang and Euphemism says that it came to designate any bad experience by extension from meaning a bad drug experience, but does not explain the drug usage.
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old hand
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old hand
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Posts: 866 |
Sparteye - BIG congrats on an impeccable piece of research.
re: "My grandmother told me that hoboes were common during the Great Depression.."
So too here in Oztraya - only they were referred to as "susso(s)" and "reffo(s)". I recall the reasons for this being explained by my grandparents and in the novel "My Brother Jack" by George Johnston. No doubt somebody will know the correct reasons, but it was something like: "susso" referred to those who'd work for food (sustenance) and those who wandered from place to place to do this were reffoes (refugees).
These provide yet another example of Ozzies adding a trailing vowel - because we can!! There's also: "ambo" for an amulance driver, "garbo" for garbage collector, Shaneo - Shane, Campo - the legendary David Campesi (known to all Rugby devotees - but nobody else). Just to be different, Fire Fighters aren't "firoes", they're "fieries". Confusing innit?
stales
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addict
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addict
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 618 |
In reply to:
Confusing innit?
Makes perfect sense to me, stalesy.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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If a gal has two good reasons, she wears T shirt.
I knew a woman had a t shirt with the words itty bitty titty committee writ across it. She was about a size 44 EE.
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