Rough Sleepers
Rough Sleepers are Homeless People in London.
I need to grudgingly admit this: the British use the English Language lots more creatively than we do. Leave it to them to come up with a term that catches the feeling of a hard night on a bench or a night spent in a dome tent pitched on the sidewalk.
What we call being out on the street
We say Homeless. That’s a term Sociologists use.
Unhoused is the latest modification. A politically correct emasculation of the word Homeless.
Vagrant is a legal term. If you sit on a bench too long you might get arrested for vagrancy. Vagabond is a vagrant who wanders around to avoid getting arrested for occupying a bench.
Bum is good but assumes moral drainage.
Hobo I really like. I hear Hobo I see a guy running to catch a freight train. I see Woody Guthrie playing his guitar. I see the neckerchief stuffed and tied to the end of a stick…a hobo stick.
Yet the word is bullshit. Hobo conjures a phony nostalgia. I never hopped a freight. My Aunt Hazel hopped a freight back in 1934. It was the great depression and lots of non-hobos hopped freights. I never hung out with Hobos. I don’t know shit about real Hobos. I just think I do from movies I’ve seen and Jack Kerouac novels I’ve read…
Tramp is very good. But it means more than one thing. It means bum. It means a wanderer…which is probably its original meaning. Finally, it means a woman that sleeps around a lot…and cheaply. Women and Gays like to use the word as a term of disparagement. In like, “that bitch is such a tramp!”
No. I gotta tell you. The British got us beat on this one: Rough Sleepers is the best term for some poor dude living on the street.
3 thoughts on “Rough Sleepers”
Remember when ” benchlands” were fertile areas created by the changed flow of a river?
Great post Gloomy. It brings back memories of spike houses in Orwell’s memoir Down and Out in London and Paris.
Down and Out was a very fine book. Orwell was a very fine writer. I remember reading his 6 rules of writing:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
I remember at the time thinking, how am I gonna remember all of that?