Your compiler’s desktop Webster’s Dictionary, a high school graduation gift he received back in 1981 and has used ever since, says this word – gumption — is of unknown origin.  Wikipedia, that great spoon-feeder of the intellectually indolent, says it’s a word that came into being in Scotland and the northerly districts of England in the 18^th Century.  So who knows for certain?

But your compiler remembers hearing it often while growing up in Georgia.   It means good common sense, spunk, and get-up-and-go, and it’s a word that generations of Southern mamas and papas used to teach their children that intangible which separated those who by grit and determination held on to family property, versus those who lost everything, in the wake of the War Between the States, Reconstruction, and the rather desolate rural economy that lasted mostly from then up until the First World War.

Your compiler remembers a story his paternal grandfather told him about gumption.  “When Kathryn’s father died in February 1938, we had been married nine years and were living and working in Richmond.   She realized when we came home to Brooks for the funeral that the farm and home would likely be sold for back taxes on the courthouse steps within a year’s time if she didn’t stay in Brooks and do everything possible to keep such a disaster from happening. She told me she intended to live in Brooks for the next year or two managing things, and that I should go back to Richmond and keep working till she could figure out how to save the farm – that we could travel back and forth for short visits often enough to keep the marriage alive.

“I kicked up a storm not wanting to be 500 miles from my wife, but soon saw that she was determined to stay in Georgia and save the farm her way if it hair-lipped hell and half of Georgia. She kicked some tail, put younger siblings who weren’t already working  quickly to work, pretty much commandeered the earnings of the entire household, cut expenses to a nub, and somehow managed to pay the back taxes and keep the homeplace.  By the time your daddy was born in February 1939, the farm was out of danger, and I realized my beautiful wife had more grit in her craw – good old-fashioned gumption – than anyone I’d ever met.  That belief was confirmed maybe fifteen years later when Mr. Ferrol Sams, the county school superintendent, told me, ‘Hubert, Kathryn’s the best damn teacher in the state.  But she’s also the contrariest.’”  

In more modern times, the term has been used to spur kids on, to give them ambition, to get them going on a task they dread or fear.  “Have some gumption and get to it!  The only way past something is to march straight through it with head held high!”  It has also been used in admiring terms in discussing the attributes of a person who has endured unbelievable difficulty or hardship, or a series thereof.  “Jessie really has a lot of gumption to have gone through all she had to deal with and come out smiling like she did.  She had to go through hell on a spavined horse, but she shook it off and came out of it with more grace and dignity than I’ve ever seen.”

Both men and women used the word, which was perfectly acceptable for usage in polite society.  A less elegant variation, usually employed by menfolk when the ladies were not around, was “piss and vinegar.”  Each is a great term, and your compiler hopes we have not lost our gumption, as well as hoping that it has not become such a rare phenomenon that we simply recognize it no longer.