A publisher, Kevin Mayhew, has written to The Tablet, which is not a computer journal but a weekly magazine of interest to Catholics, complaining that the newly revised translation of the Mass is ‘lumpen, difficult and odd’. What would you think he meant by lumpen?
Or try this, from a recent review in the TLS of a biography of Jack London, commenting on an example of detail in The People of the Abyss (1903): ‘a deceptively lumpen old man who gently tucks a rogue strand of hair behind his wife’s ear’.
The English word lumpen derives from Karl Marx’s use of Lumpenproletariat. He first used it in 1850 of the ‘down and outs’ who make no contribution to the workers’ cause. Lumpenproletariat appeared in an English book for the first time in 1924, in a translation of The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850, where Marx calls them a ‘recruiting ground for thieves and criminals of all kinds living on the crumbs of society, people without a definite trade, vagabonds’.
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