hoeboy (?)

[Jonathan Lighter]

My gut tells me (haven't had lunch yet) that "Hobey-men" is a misprint for "*Honey-men."
  See HDAS for several exx. of "honey" in this sense.

  JL

George Thompson <george.thompson at NYU.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: George Thompson
Subject: Re: hoeboy (?)
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>
> I suspect it's the same as "ho-boy"/"haut-boy", shown in Bartlett's
> 1860 _Dictionary of Americanisms_ (readable at Google Books), meaning
> "nightman", i.e., one whose occupation is the removal of excrement
> from privies.
>

I think that Doug Wilson has the answer.

It doesn't appear that "ho-boy" is in the OED, Mathews' Dictionary of Americanisms, or DARE -- though since it's a word mostly in oral circulation, the spelling isn't fixed and so it's hard to be sure that it's not under something I haven't guessed at. But it's not among the words beginning "hob" in Mathews or DARE, and doesn't turn up searching OED full-text for "ho boy" or "hobey".

As for an antedating:
. . . the carelessness and insufferable conduct of our black night-gentry; commonly called Hobey-men. . . .
New-York Evening Post, June 7, 1820, p. 2, col. 3. [= night-soil men]

It also appears in a memoir of NYC published in 1945, so the word was still being used in the 1870s or 1880s.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Douglas G. Wilson"
Date: Saturday, December 22, 2007 9:43 pm
Subject: Re: hoeboy (?)
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU


> >An unprincipled scoundrel, named Conrad Sweidenmeyer, or some such
> >outlandish name, has long been in the habit of making sausages and
> >Bologna puddings out of dead rats, cats, dogs, and even horses, by
> >which abominable villainy he has realized a considerable
> >fortune. *** People can not be too cautious how they even touch
> >sausages -- even when made properly and by Christians, there is
> >something disgusting about them; but as they are now made, by
> >hoeboys, and out of putrid dogs and rats, they are truly
> >horrifying. The sale of them ought to be interdicted by law.
> > Subterranean, June 28, 1845, p. 2, col. 3
> >
> >Is this perhaps "hoe-boy", i. e., farmer?
>
> I suspect it's the same as "ho-boy"/"haut-boy", shown in Bartlett's
> 1860 _Dictionary of Americanisms_ (readable at Google Books), meaning
> "nightman", i.e., one whose occupation is the removal of excrement
> from privies.
>
> Maybe the above provides an antedating: the 1860 book shows a
> citation from 1857.
>
> I don't know why the latrine-cleaner was called a "ho-boy". The
> spelling "haut-boy" would seem to be modeled on the homophonous word
> for "oboe". _Maybe_ "hoe-boy" is the original form: maybe a hoe was
> traditionally used to collect the nightsoil?
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>
>
> --
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> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org . . . the carelessness and insufferable conduct of our black night-gentry; commonly called Hobey-men. . . .
New-York Evening Post, June 7, 1820, p. 2, col. 3. [= night-soil men]

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