@GcL In the case of "murder hobo" it's working on two different vectors. The Great Depression saw a valorization of the blameless homeless which persists in some fiction, but modern concepts of homelessness are almost entirely negative and victim-blaming.
Honestly, yes, some romanticization of the hobo experience is a thing in Americana, but it feels like a stretch to say that people don't think "dirty unproductive lazy homeless" immediately with the word.
Maybe my experience is the outlier and I can adjust if so. But just saying that my own feelings of the word 'hobo' are not modern homelessness. I don't see a homeless person on the street and think hobo.
There might be some other nuances to it. I think of homelessness, in the modern sense, as being something that happens to someone/something they experience, while hobo is more a mode of living
I've always felt hobo was more time- and setting-dependent, in the same way that calling a car a motor carriage isn't exactly wrong, but the niche it filled doesn't exactly exist today
Here's the thing: a gang of obscenely rich and powerful serial killers unconnected to any social or legal checks and balances, without family or nation, is not accurately described by any term associated with poverty or homelessness but using such terms does reinforce both exotified "freedom from society" and violent "psychotic murderer" associations with poverty and homelessness.
@Upper_Case Might depend on where you live. Being in a city with a central downtown, I've heard people say hobo in recent memory. Panhandler and homeless are more common terms though.
@NautArch Agreed. But hobo implies knowledge of how to live that way successfully (like the famous hobo signs, if real, though I've never been able to confirm that they are)
@GcL yeah, but MO covers more than victim pool. Serial killers (and I'm an expert because we binged a season of both Mindhunter and Instinct recently) tend to have preference for the kind of victim (race, social class, appearance, whatever) and signature features in how they kill, how they leave the body, why they kill etc.
@NautArch Are you sure we're disagreeing? Honestly I don't think soldiers are mass murderers, and normally neither are PCs. Murder hobos are. Where are we diverging?
@NautArch Further support for my position, I think. Different words describe different things, and using language precisely is about choosing the correct description and therefore the correct word
@GcL Reinforcing those misconceptions of homelessness creates additional barriers to people in need being treated like people and getting whatever help they need, and legitimizes them being treated as "problems" to be gotten rid of or blames them for their situations which in turn makes others less likely to ensure they get basic support.
@GcL I think the premise here is that the terms and tropes could reinforce certain viewpoints, and that is bad enough, regardless of how the numbers work in practice
@NautArch Hmm? You may have misunderstood me, or I'm misunderstanding you. I'm talking about putting the homeless in a negative light for the sake of describing a controversial PC attitude.
@AndrasDeak I'm a step behind that. I'm just asking what you'd call someone who has no home, travels to find local work, and then moves on. Rinse/repeat.
But if there's a large portion of the population that disparages the group because it's that group, then any description they use is going to be disparaging as well
I'm much more open to a person from such a group, or a representative of some sort of advocacy for that group, suggesting discomfort with a term and suggesting alternatives, but I've not come across migrant as a dirty term (maybe a regional thing?)
@GcL I'm fond of "tourist" in this context because tourism IS messy and brings to mind the idea of being completely disassociated from the reality of the place you're in, only interested in how it can serve your personal needs.
There is a thriving business in robbing and scamming tourists around the world, into tie immemorial. Quite a few tourists have been murdered under mysterious circumstances in the Dominican Republic lately
:51822122 Do we want to argue about it, because we can probably go full ontology about it. Those lead to decades long arguments about meanings, definitions, and connotations.
I strongly suggest that if this continues, everyone remember that we're talking about using real-world groups to describe game behaviour, and whether or not a term is technically accurate by the dictionary it's messier in the real world.
I'm still not certain that hobo is representative of a real-world term currently in use about today's homeless. But I'll concede that I may be incorrect about that.
