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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Arlough" data-source="post: 6175769" data-attributes="member: 79335">Generally, anymore, this word lands into 'contextless offender' category.  It is filled with words that people have chosen to take offense at with no understanding of the word, and no consideration of context.  To give another example, the word "nerd" when used to describe one's self is probably not pejorative, but there are those who will take offense to it anyway.As for 'hobo', the origin story is below...I actually learned this one fairly recently (<a href="https://www.google.com/#q=etymology" target="_blank">etymology</a> being one of my many, mostly useless, hobbies.)Hobo actually came from men with skill sets oriented towards agricultural labor who carried the tool of their trade with them as they went place to place, following the work.  That tool, the common hoe.  They were 'Hoe boys' (not a boy band) that could be found near most agricultural commodity rail yards looking for work, and they were some of this century's earliest migrant farm workers. Often, because of the nature of such work, they tended towards a nomadic lifestyle.  And, probably as a further result of that lifestyle, they tended not to have any investment in the communities they traveled through and thus became labeled as the source of all sorts of local ills.The phrase became more mainstream when the depression set in, and those wandering laborers surged in population.So, as migrant workers carrying the tool of their trade who are blamed (not always unjustly) for the ills of the communities they visit, I find it a fitting analogy.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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