A beach bum is someone who spends as much time as possible at the beach, usually surfing, sunbathing and doing very little else, and who arranges the rest of life around that. It began as a mild insult, with the sting of ‘layabout’ about it, but the phrase has softened considerably. People now happily call themselves beach bums, and the words turn up on holiday t-shirts as a small boast rather than an accusation.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘beach bum’?
The phrase is American, and the place to start is ‘bum’ itself, a word that means quite different things on either side of the Atlantic. The British bum, the one being counted in bums on seats, is a word for the backside that goes back to the fourteenth century. The American bum is a separate and much later word for an idler or vagrant. It is recorded from 1864, a shortening of the slightly earlier ‘bummer’, generally traced to the German ‘Bummler’, a loafer, and it took hold in Northern army slang during the Civil War, in an army that included some two hundred thousand German immigrants.
The character the phrase describes is older than the phrase. ‘Beachcomber’ is recorded from 1840, and by 1889 the Century Dictionary was defining it as a seafaring man of vagrant and drunken habits who idled about the wharves of Pacific seaports. The beach bum is the beachcomber’s twentieth-century descendant, with the wharves swapped for sunshine and surf.
As for the phrase itself, the earliest example so far found comes not from the 1960s surf boom but from wartime America. Green’s Dictionary of Slang cites the Saturday Evening Post in 1944: “Back at the profession of being a beach bum, a salt-water playboy”. By August 1950, Life magazine was reporting that the ski bums it had profiled in winters past were now beach bums for the summer, its subjects being California surfers. The ‘-bum’ compound was by then a productive formula: attach it to any pastime and you had a word for someone who let that pastime crowd out gainful employment.
The phrase is sometimes claimed as an Australian coinage of the 1960s. The dated evidence points the other way: the early citations are American, and the term travelled outward with surf culture. What the 1960s surf craze did do was carry the phrase around the world and add relatives such as ‘beach bunny’, recorded from 1963 for a young woman who frequented the surf scene without surfing. Being called a beach bum in 1944 implied fecklessness; printing it on your own t-shirt in the 2020s implies little more than a fondness for sand and an enviable diary.