bummer

Mr. Jukes, who had been scanning the shore through a pair of glasses, informed the chief engineer afterwards that "our late second mate hasn't been long in finding a friend. A chap looking uncommonly like a bummer. I saw them walk away together from the quay."

- Conrad, Typhoon

"When sound and fury is substituted for useful endeavour, it becomes known as bumming, so that the big-high-heid-yin in, say, a factory, or a company spokesman, might be dismissively referred to as 'the heid bummer'. Ther term is also used of those who make speeches at functions, which others have laboured long and hard to organise, while the orator gets the accolades. It became synonymous with pomposity and bombast. Someone praising his own product, venture, talents or achievements was said to be 'bummin his load' or 'bummin it up', a process we might style today as hyping. Anyway, one given to such behaviour might simply be regarded as a bummer, bummler or bum, 'better at the promise than the performance'."
- 'Speaking Scots', John MacLeay in The Scots Magazine, Sep 2001.

"We visited many fishing villages clinging like treacle to the wave-battered cliffs of the Avalon Peninsula and examined a multitude of vessels ranging from small and ancient 'bully boats' to a venerable two-hundred-ton, three-masted schooner. Most were no longer seaworthy, but eventually we found a small schooner of a kind known as a Southern Shore bummer hauled out at the little outport of Admiral's Cove, not far from Fermeuse."
--Farley Mowat, Bay of Spirits, NY: Carroll and Graf, 2006.