[f. CLOD sb. + HOP v.; perh. with humorous allusion to grass-hopper.]
1. One who walks over plowed land; a plowman or agricultural laborer; a country lout; hence, a clumsy awkward boor, a clown.
c. 1690. B. E., Dict. Cant. Crew, Clod-hopper, a Ploughman.
1721. Mrs. Centlivre, Artifice, III. i. Did you ever see a dog brought on a plate, clodhopper? Did you?
1824. Miss Mitford, Village, Ser. I. (1863), 136. He turned his clowns into gentlemen, and their brother clod-hoppers laughed at them, and they were ashamed.
2. pl. A plowman’s heavy shoes.
1836. E. Howard, R. Reefer, lxii. Purser’s shoes … a hybrid breed, between a pair of cast-off slippers and the ploughman’s clodhoppers.
3. A bird; the Wheat-ear. Cf. CLOTBIRD.
1834. Mudie, Brit. Birds (1841), I. 267. The fallow-chat, wheat-ear, and clod-hopper are not inappropriate names.
1885. Swainson, Prov.-n. Brit. Birds, 10 (E. D. S.).
Hence (nonce-wds.) Clodhoppering, Clodhopperish, Clodhoppership.
1832. J. Wilson, in Blackw. Mag., XXXI. 1002/1. Our own dislike to their clodhopperships.
1880. Mrs. Whitney, Odd or Even, 37. The traditional clodhoppering which real New England farm-life has long been rising away from.
