Despite years spent sleeping under the stars, of-no-fixed-abode resident Jimmy "One Tooth" McGill remains unsure where he stands in the itinerant classification system.  

"Legally speaking, I'm a vagrant, but that's really a catch-all term for anyone involved in dodgy outdoor behaviour," said the former merchant navy man. "Vagrancy is what I do, but it's not who I am."  

McGill's interest in self-definition was sparked when a fellow ne'er-do-well referred to him as a bum. "Until that time I had always thought of myself as a wino, and said so. But this fellow pointed out that I couldn't be a wino as I didn't drink wine, only Old Smuggler brand scotch. My illusions were shattered." 

"I ask people on the street for money, so I suppose that makes me a beggar," the occasional Vinnie's resident said. "But sometimes I feed them a bullshit story about needing money for a train ticket. Does that turn me from a beggar into a panhandler? Or am I a beggar and a panhandler?" 

A brief period where McGill referred to himself as a hobo came to an abrupt conclusion when he discovered that hobos ride trains in search of occasional work. "I fulfilled neither of the chief criteria necessary, and my whittling skills are passable at best." 

McGill's search for identity has come at a terrible cost, preventing him from seeking work, bathing or carrying his belongings in anything other than over-sized, multi-coloured nylon bags. But he denies that his taxonomic obsession makes him a splitter-of-hairs, instead preferring to think of himself as a pedant.  

 

 

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