Definition of "cropper" [crop•per]

• A person who works land in return for a share of the yield; a sharecropper. (noun)
• A heavy fall; a tumble. (noun)
• A disastrous failure; a fiasco. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Thus the cropper was a worker, not an owner; his status was halfway between a kind of serfdom and the autonomy of ownership."
• "Humor likes to explode pretension, pedantry, dignity, pomposity; we get a feeling of joy whenever those who are superior come a cropper, which is increased when we feel that they have no right to their places."
• "But it probably doesn't affect anything even remotely, except to boost the morale of the looney Fascists of Hamas, their Euro-wally supporters, et al. But that is not necessarily bad, it may encourage them to get over-confident, over-step "the mark" and come the proverbial "cropper"."