Stump-Jumper

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jim Sheen. How are you?

Doing well. How are you, Jim?

I’m doing very well. I’m calling from Vernon, Connecticut.

You’re in Vernon, Connecticut. All right.

I am. Well, I have a kind of a question that kind of goes back to my childhood.

I remember my grandmother referring to the phrase stump jumper, and I am a native Vermonter, and I’ve been referred to as a stump jumper, and I just wonder if I should be proud or offended.

Who’s calling you that?

Yeah.

Well, a couple people have throughout my life, some of them family members.

In what kind of way do they say it?

Do they say, Jim, you stump jumper?

No, it wasn’t said in any kind of a direct, you know, as an insult or anything.

It was just Vermonter, a.k.a. stump jumper.

Aha.

Very interesting.

Well, do you have any idea what it might mean?

Well, my grandmother, I do remember her mentioning when I was very little, probably five or six. She tried to explain it, and I don’t recall the whole thing. I remember there was something about Native Americans, and I don’t remember much beyond that.

A stump jumper can go both ways. Sometimes it’s nice, sometimes it’s mean. It’s all about whether you’re an insider or an outsider.

Generally, it means a bumpkin or a rustic or a hillbilly, and I can trace it back in that usage about 100 years or so.

Jim, do you think of yourself that way?

Well, not really. I’ve been in Connecticut a long time. Sometimes it just means a small farmer, you know, somebody who’s got a lot of land that maybe they cleared for themselves and maybe relatively recently and they haven’t pulled the stumps up.

Where the pejorative or the derogatory part comes in, that there sometimes is an insinuation there that he’s a bit lazy, and the reason he has to jump the stumps when he’s plowing is because he was too lazy to go out there and yank them out.

Aha.

But the term has been used a number of different ways over the years, and one of the really struck me, I found one use of this, of a telephone lineman, a man who climbs the poles to do stuff, sometimes called himself a stump jumper because he’s actually climbing up these, you know, these big poles that used to be trees.

And I’ve seen a couple of uses where a stump jumper is somebody who jumps from stump to stump on policies without ever settling on one. So it’s kind of the old fashioned flip flopper.

Oh, that’s interesting. So in a political sense.

I didn’t see that coming. But it makes sense because you’re giving a stump speech.

Sure.

But the more common stump jumper is a type of plow, which I believe was invented in Australia in the late 1800s, which is literally a stump jumper where you don’t have to clear the stumps out of your land, and it will work around them or kind of work over them.

And what it means is that you can clear land and get to farming right away without spending all this time with the ox, you know, pulling the stumps out or the dynamite even getting the stumps out.

But that wouldn’t apply to somebody in Vermont.

Well, you know, the thing is, like, it’s not unheard of for a word to be coined more than once in different places. But I’m just saying, like, I’m just suggesting that there’s another stump jumper out there that is interesting.

I wonder if there are people in Vermont who proudly call themselves stump jumpers, you know? I mean, my father’s people call themselves hillbillies or hill people.

And it was, you know.

Well, I don’t ever recall it having a bad connotation.

Okay.

Just it was kind of stump jumper, a.k.a. Vermont or the other way around.

Yeah, I could see that being taken as a self-identification where somebody is proud of the fact that they’re making a living from the hard earth.

Yeah, they work hard in the field.

Jim, well, thank you so much for calling.

Well, I thank you, and I’ll be listening.

Okay.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks.

Have a great day.

All right.

You too.

Did somebody call you something and you’re not sure whether it’s an insult? Let us sort it out, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.