Clodhopper meaning

Noun: clodhopper

Pronunciation: (‘klód,hó-pu(r))

Clodhopper meaning:

• A thick and heavy shoe

Synonyms: brogan, brogue, work shoe 

• [informal] An awkward stupid person

Synonyms: lout, clod, stumblebum, goon, oaf, lubber, lummox, lump, gawk, clodpole, clot

Derived forms: clodhoppers

Quotations:

1. Martin Luther – A person who does not regard music as a marvelous creation of God, must be a clodhopper indeed and does not deserve to be called a human being; he should be permitted to hear nothing but the braying of asses and the grunting of hogs.
2. Aldo Leopold – Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets, but humbler folk may circumvent this restriction if they know how. To plant a pine, for example, one need be neither god nor poet; one need only own a shovel. By virtue of this curious loophole in the rules, any clodhopper may say: Let there be a tree  and there will be one.
3. Genevieve Valentine – I promise not to step on you. I only look like a clodhopper, he was saying when Jo reached them. He winked at Ella, who glanced away and blinked, as if surprised that he’d come so close to guessing what she thought. Jo slid up to the bar behind her sister, planted a stiff arm on the ledge, and raised an eyebrow at him. He glanced up and saw her. She expected him to blanche, or bristle, or pretend he’d just forgotten someplace else he had to be. A lot of men did that, when they realized that the girl they thought was alone had brought friends to look out for her.
4. Hallgrímur Helgason – After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of sechs as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men.  The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. But the morning after they turned into weak-willed doughboys. But all the same I did succeed in loving them, those Icelandic clodhoppers, at least down as far as their knees. Below there, things did not go as well. And when the feet popped out of me in the maternity ward, it was enough.
5. Evelyn Waugh – Then they began saying, Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury. Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified libido and see me bathe, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.
6. Christopher McDougall – Wilt Chamberlain, all seven feet one inch and 275 pounds of him, had no problem running a 50-mile ultra when he was sixty years old after his knees had survived a lifetime of basketball. Hell, a Norwegian sailor named Mensen Ernst barely even remembered what dry land felt like when he came ashore back in 1832, but he still managed to run all the way from Paris to Moscow to win a bet, averaging one hundred thirty miles a day for fourteen days, wearing God only knows what kind of clodhoppers on God only knows what kind of roads.
7. Lisa Kleypas – I’m here at the earl’s behest to talk to a set of clodhoppers about their turnip planting. As soon as that’s concluded, I can promise you that I’ll return to London with all possible haste. Clodhoppers? Kathleen drew in a sharp breath, thinking of the tenant families and the way they worked and persevered and endured the hardships of farming all to put food on the table of men such as this, who looked down his nose at them.
8. Harper Lee – There you go, wading in your clodhoppers through our private territory.

Sample sentences:

1. If we don’t want life to treat us like poor clodhoppers or bland hang-about, we have to turn surviving into living, readjust our course and propel pointedly a precise track, without being deterred by fear and apprehension.
2. The nineteenth was the first century of human sympathy,  the age when half wonderingly we began to descry in others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself; when clodhoppers and peasants, and tramps and thieves, and millionaires and  sometimes  Negroes, became throbbing souls whose warm pulsing life touched us so nearly that we half gasped with surprise, crying, Thou too! Hast Thou seen Sorrow and the dull waters of Hopelessness? Hast Thou known Life?
3. Fiddlesticks! Rall replied. These clodhoppers will not attack us, and should they do so, we will simply fall on them and rout them.
4. I’m a migrant worker picking frozen peas ,and a clodhopper hiding behind a white sheet. I’m a shootout at Ruby Ridge, and a freefall of flames. I am closed for the winter, and crawling in my playpen. I am cold, and quick chatter and beautiful smiles. I am a man missing a limb, and lettuce and tomatoes. I am a palace, and fresh milk and goat cheese. I’m the great emptiness among Cubans, and a job that requires the auditing of truth and lies. I’m a confounding calm that will shatter fear and complacency, and a town full of self-defined renegades and recluses. I’m a public execution, and a lanky husband waiting by the checkout.
5. You were a drunken idiot-genius indeed tonight, even if I was a drunken clodhopper. Lashing up my leg! Tying up our swords so we couldn’t use them save as clubs! The Mouser shrugged. Yet that sword-tying doubtless saved us from committing a number of murders tonight. He retorted, a little hotly, Killing in fight isn’t murder. Again the Mouser shrugged. Killing is murder, no matter what nice names you give. Just as eating is devouring, and drinking guzzling. Gods, I’m dry, famished, and fatigued!
6. people too are all of those things, and if you don’t learn to work out people you remain a clodhopper, a slave to procedures and processes, someone who pursues targets rather than wrongdoers.
7. I won’t check my boots at the door, so I don’t know what you’re waiting for. Yeah, I’m gonna mess up your floor with big clodhopper prints you can’t ignore. Five. Four. Three. Two. See. Now everyone come follow me. Let’s clean house with the industry  that wants our eyeballs stuck on its vanity. Abracadabra. Mr. Ravenel, if you are to spend a fortnight here, you will conduct yourself like a gentleman, or I will have you forcibly taken to Alton and tossed onto the first railway car that stops at the station. West blinked and looked at her, clearly wondering if she was serious. Those girls are the most important thing in the world to me, Kathleen said. I will not allow them to be harmed. I have no intention of harming anyone, West said, offended. I’m here at the earl’s behest to talk to a set of clodhoppers about their turnip planting. As soon as that’s concluded, I can promise you that I’ll return to London with all possible haste. Clodhoppers? Kathleen drew in a sharp breath, thinking of the tenant families and the way they worked and persevered and endured the hardships of farming all to put food on the table of men such as this, who looked down his nose at them.