“Bummer”

I used “Love and Logic” language, often. I give lots of choices and often responds to a poor choice with “bummer”.

Remember we have been in school for more than 3/4 of the year. I have uttered “bummer” an innumerable amount of times.

This week I had to pause when an ELL student told me they looked “bummer” up and couldn’t find it in the dictionary. Could I tell them what it means?

We segued into talking about context clues and possible meanings for “bummer” from their experience of how I use it. They had a clear picture of the meaning, from my use, but wanted to see a dictionary definition.

I had never thought about “bummer” not being in the dictionary, nor had I thought about my need to possibly provide a definition.

This story takes an interesting twist when I Googled “bummer” and found a slew of dictionaries with definitions, synonyms, etc. I wonder where this student looked up the word.