What Is The Origin Of (169)?…
Come a cropper
Nowadays we use the phrase to describe someone who has come badly unstuck, who has failed spectacularly. When it first appeared in print, in 1858 in R S Surtees’ Ask Mamma, it was associated with hunting and riding; “[he] rode at an impracticable fence, and got a cropper for his pains.” The invaluable, if somehat exhaustively entitled, A Dictionary of Modern Slang, Cant, and Vulgar Words Used at the Present day in the Streets of London, compiled by John C Hotten in 1859, confirmed this sense when defining cropper or to go a cropper or to come a cropper as “to fall badly.” To confirm this sense, in 1877 H A Leveson noted in Sport in Many Lands that “my horse put his foot in a hole and came down a cropper.”
So, in all probability, we need to look at horses for the origin of our phrase. A croup, which may owe its own origin to the Old Norse word kropp which meant a swelling or lump on the body, was a term used in English to refer to the nether regions or the rump of a horse. A variant of the term was crop. Interestingly, a crupper was the term used to describe the strap that passed back under the saddle from the rump to the harness on a horse.
Lady Caroline Nairne, in her Poems published in 1791, described an incident where an intoxicated rider got his just desserts: “a man on horseback, drunk with gin and flip, (a gin based dessert drink made with a whole egg)/ bawling out – Yoix – and cracking of his whip/…The startish beast took fright, and flop/ The mad brain’d rider tumbled, neck and crop!” You can imagine that the poor nag managed somehow to land on both its neck and its hindquarters at the same time, a rather undignified and potentially lethal position to find itself in, for sure. As to whether this was anatomically possible, I would not like to hazard a guess.
Perhaps we do not need to dwell too long on contortionist nags. From around the start of the 15th century in English there was a phrase heels over head, which meant a spectacular and complete fall or collapse. Perhaps reflecting our rather headcentric view of the human body this phrase was inverted to the more instantly recognisable head over heels. Perhaps the most spectacular, and often most amusing, form of someone falling head over heels is someone treading on a banana skin. It is worth noting that the vernacular arse over tit preserves the original order of heels over head.
It may not be too fanciful to suppose that neck and crop was the equine version of head and heels. The grammarians define an agent noun as a word that performs the function of a verb. They usually end in –er or –or. Cropper may be such an agent noun derived from the truncation of the phrase neck and crop.
However cropper was formed, by the 1870s it had escaped the confines of the equestrian world to have the more general, figurative sense we know today. In his The Way We Live Know, published in 1875, Anthony Trollope wrote; “he would be coming a cropper rather were he to marry Melmotte’s daughter for her money, and then find that she had got none.” I hope I haven’t come a cropper in trying to unravel the origins of this phrase.
