Mia from Iowa City, Iowa, says she and her fiance disagree about the intensity of meaning in the words bummed and bummer. Does the term to bum someone out refer to “being a source of mild aggravation” or does it imply something closer to...
Bummer, the small-disappointment word, traces back to German bummler, a loafer or drifter. English soon had bum in a similar sense, and its negative associations later attached to phrases such as bum deal, bum rap, and bum trip. By the late 1960s...