Coal crapping

[NW Mailing List]

Neill Herring, Jesup GA

I have read the items about "coal crapping" with interest. It has prompted this speculation: 

I wonder if the word "crapping" shares the same pronunciation for its first syllable as the word for a type of fish, the "crappie?"  

The fish is commonly pronounced as "croppie."  Perhaps "coal crappers" is similarly pronounced, as "coal croppers."  

That term could have been derived from the agricultural economic practice then becoming common throughout the south, "share cropping," a largely cashless form of farm tenancy in which the crop was divided in shares between the landowner and the farmer, with the division determined by the amount of "furnish" the landowner was obligated to provide the "cropper."  The "furnish" could include housing,   draft animals, farming equipment, and usually credit at the local commission merchant's store, or the landowner's commisary.

A "coal crapper" could then be something of a satirical name for a coal thief, someone who "cropped" from the railroad and the mines it served.  I have heard the term "cropping on shares" used in jocular political discourse in Georgia, as in "That candidate's been half-cropping for Georgia Power," or some other poltically dubious connection. 

Neill Herring  

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