3. (American.)—An idler; loafer; sponger; looter (see quots.). [From
the German bummler, with a somewhat similar meaning, save that the term
is used good naturedly, and has not altogether the offensive meaning of
the American equivalent.] The term came into general use at the time of
the Civil War, when it was specially applied to a straggler, hanger-on,
or free-lance, particularly in connection with General Sherman’s famous
march from Atlanta to the sea. Besides its political signification,
bummer is used as a general term of reproach in the same way as rascal,
blackleg, etc., are used in England. Other equivalents are heeler,
striker, stuffer, and practical politician.
a. 1865. Major Nichols, Sherman’s Great March. Look hyar, Captain,
we bummers ain’t so bad after all. We keep ahead of the skirmish
line allers; we let’s ’em know when an enemy’s a comin’, and then
we ain’t allus away from the regiment. We turns over all we don’t
want ourselves, and we can lick five times as many Rebs as we are
any day.
1872. S. L. Clemens (‘Mark Twain’), Roughing It, ch. xxiv. The
auctioneer stormed up and down the streets on him for four days,
dispersing the populace, interrupting business, and destroying
children, and never got a bid—at least never any but the
eighteen-dollar one he hired, a notoriously substanceless bummer,
to make. The people only smiled pleasantly, and restrained their
desire to buy, if they had any.
1872. Sacramento Weekly Union, Feb. 24, p. 2. All the boys to be
trained as scriveners, tape-measurers, counter-hoppers, clerks,
pettifoggers, polite loafers, street-hounds, hoodlums, and bummers.
1875. Scribner’s Magazine, p. 274. San Francisco is the Elysium of
bummers. Nowhere can a worthless fellow, too lazy to work, too
cowardly to steal, get on so well. The climate befriends him, for
he can sleep out of doors four-fifths of the year. He can gorge
himself daily for a nominal sum, and get a dinner that a king might
envy for fifty cents.
1877. W. Black, Green Past. and Picc., ch. xiii. Then the great
crowd of bummers and loafers, not finding the soil teeming with
nuggets, stampeded off like a herd of buffalo.
1888. Philadelphia Press, Jan. 29. Coy is the chairman of the
Democratic Central Committee in Marion County, and has wielded
great power in politics as the boss of the bummers.
1888. Detroit Free Press, May 16. He finds that ten per cent. of
the men who patronise these places have a collegiate education;
forty per cent. are self-supporting, but prefer this precarious
mode of living to anything more respectable; ten per cent. earn
excellent wages, and twenty per cent. are chronic bums, who beg or
steal the price of their lodgings.
Hence bummerism, to express habits of loafing and petty stealing, and
bummerish (adj.).
Bumming, verb, subs. (Wellington College).—A thrashing, or licking.
Cf., Bum, sense 1.
Bump, subs. (University).—When one boat touches another in a race it is
said to ‘make a bump,’ and technically beats its opponent. Cf., verbal
sense, and Bumping race.
Verb.—To overtake and touch an opposing boat, thus winning the heat or
race.
1849. Thackeray, Pendennis, ch. iii. He listened, and with respect
too, to Mr. Foker’s accounts of what the men did at the University
of which Mr. F. was an ornament, and encountered a long series of
stories about boat-racing, bumping, College grass-plats, and
milk-punch.
1860. Macmillan’s Magazine, March, p. 331. The chances of St.
Ambrose’s making a bump the first night were weighed.
1865. Sketches from Cambridge, p. 7. I can still condescend to give
our boat a stout when it makes a bump.
1886–7. Dickens, Dictionary of Cambridge, p. 11. Any boat which
overtakes and bumps another ... before the winning post is reached,
changes place with it for the next race.
Bumper, subs. (common).—1. Anything of superlative size, whether a ‘big
lie,’ horse, house, or woman. Cf., Corker, Whopper, and Thumper.