Chandler from Chesapeake, Virginia, wonder about a term her in-laws use to mean in abundance, as in “We have strawberries up the gump stump.” The expression seems to have evolved from an earlier phrase possum up a gum tree or possum up a gum stump, referring to a hunted animal that’s trapped. Over time, it became the rhyming phrase up a gump stump, and like the phrase up the wazoo, came to mean in abundance. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Up the Gump Stump” Means Having Something in Abundance”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Chandler from Chesapeake, Virginia.
Welcome to the show. What can we do for you, Chandler?
Well, I have a question about a term I heard my mother and father-in-law use, and I’d never heard it before or since.
Well, the first time I heard them use it, they were talking about their strawberries. They had a huge patch of strawberries, and they said, we have strawberries up the gump stump.
And I had never heard up the gump stump before, and I have never heard anyone else use it except for them.
Up the gump stump, so they rhyme.
Yep.
That’s what they said.
And that meant a lot of strawberries.
It meant a lot, well, whatever, yeah, a lot of anything.
About when was that, do you remember?
Oh, probably, the first time I heard it, golly, was probably in the early 60s.
Okay, gotcha.
And my father-in-law was from North Carolina, and my mother-in-law was from California. But I have a feeling it probably came from his side of the family.
The oldest variant of this that I know of is up a gum tree or just plain old up a tree. And this goes back to at least as far back as the 1820s in the U.S. and Canada and Australia.
So if someone is up a gum tree or up a tree, it’s kind of like a treed animal. The hounds are baying at the foot of the tree and you’ve got no place to go.
And then before too long, it’s kind of elaborated upon. And both in Australia and in the United States, you could see people saying or hear people saying possum up a gum tree.
And the possum in Australia and the United States, they’re different animals, but the expression works in both places.
And then as early as 1912, you might see possum up a gump stump, where I believe it’s the same expression. And what’s happened is they meant the stump of a gum tree.
But for the rhyming sake of it, they call it a gump stump because we do that in English. We make stuff rhyme sometimes just for the rhythm and the sound of it.
So 1912, there is a song that I think one of the main lines is possum up a gump stump. But then by the 1960s, up the gump stump behaves a little differently.
It stops meaning that you’re trapped or cornered or that you’ve got no alternatives. And it starts to mean that you’ve got a lot of something or that you’ve got an abundance beyond all control.
And you particularly see it among people in the military and in politics. It’s kind of like up the wazoo in that both gump stump and wazoo are really indirect or oblique euphemisms for the butt or the rear end.
The idea being that you’ve got so much of something that it’s showing up in unexpected places. So it’s up the gump stump or out the wazoo, right?
Oh, well, he was in the Navy.
Oh, there you go.
So maybe that’s where he got it.
I don’t know. I was thinking it was something from North Carolina because I know they had some weird sayings down there.
It’s possible.
But maybe it was just from the Navy.
The earliest use that I know of in print for certain, and there are probably others, was Ken Kesey in his jail journal. He was the acid guy, the drug experimenting guy.
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest guy.
Yeah.
Really?
So you’ve got time up the gump stump. So he’s talking about being in jail and having all the time in the world.
But no doubt it’s older than 1967. That’s just the first use that I know of.
Well, I certainly appreciate the information. Chandler, thanks for sharing your story with us.
You’re certainly welcome.
Take care now. Bye-bye.
You too. Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
