Hard-core means completely committed, or extreme in kind. The ones who turn up in the rain.
The commitment sense is admiring, so hard-core supporters or a hard-core following describes the people who stay when everybody else drifts away. There is an intensity sense meaning extreme, which is how the word attaches to music genres and, quite separately, to pornography, where hard-core is a legal category. Building has a plain literal sense, since hardcore is the rubble laid under a road or a floor.
hardcore comes from hard + core: hard to the core; 1936 (n.); 1951 (adj.)
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 26 of A Man Called Ove.
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