audreyh1
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
It is an interesting word! Here's an excerpt from the online Word Detective:
“Chump,” meaning “an idiot, a blockhead” or “a sucker, a loser,” actually appeared in English at roughly the same time as “chum,” but has never been anything but a dismissive insult. The initial meaning of “chump” when it first appeared in print in 1680 was “a lump of wood chopped or sawed off a bigger piece,” i.e., an end-piece or trimming. The source of “chump” is, alas, uncertain, but one possible source is an Old Norse word “kumba,” meaning “block of wood,” perhaps influenced in English by the form of such words as “lump” and “stump.” In the 19th century, “chump” was used to mean the blunt end of anything (“As if they had been unskilfully cut off the chump-end of something,” Great Expectations, Dickens, 1861), as well as being slang for the human head (“Think how unpleasant it is to have your chump lopped off,” V. Nabokov, 1960). But by the late 1800s, “chump” was also being used in its modern sense of “a person as stupid as a chump of wood” (“Such a long-winded old chump at telling a story,” 1883).
-BB
Thanks! I’m always interested in word origins.