2. (common).—Coarse or insufficient fare. [[271]]
Hard-up, subs. (common).—1. A collector of cigar ends, a topper-hunter. [Which refuse, untwisted and chopped up, is sold to the very poor.] Sometimes Hard-cut. Fr., un mégottier.
1851–61. H. Mayhew, Lond. Lab. and Lond. Poor, i., p. 5. The cigar-end finders, or hard-ups, as they are called, who collect the refuse pieces of smoked cigars from the gutters, and having dried them, sell them as tobacco to the very poor.
1888. Tit Bits, 24 March, 373. Smoking hard-up is picking up the stumps of cigars thrown away in the streets, cutting them up, and smoking them in the pipe.
1891. Morning Advertiser, 26 Mar. A constable on duty on the Embankment early in the morning saw the accused prowling about, and on asking what he was doing, received the reply that he was looking for hard cut.—Mr. Vaughan: Looking for what?—The Prisoner: Hard-cut; dropped cigar-ends.
2. (common).—A poor man; a stony-broke (q.v.).
1857. Ducange Anglicus, Vulg. Tongue. Hard-up, a poor person.
Adv. phr. (colloquial).—1. Very badly in want of money; in urgent need of anything. Also Hard-run and Hard-pushed.
1809–41. Th. Hook, The Sutherlands. He returned, and being hard up, as we say, took it into his head to break a shop-window at Liverpool, and take out some trumpery trinket stuff.
1821. Haggart, Life, p. 104. There I met in with two Edinburgh snibs, who were hard up.