“Looks like some friends are joining us!”
That’s the sound of someone who’s been chumming. But chumming is two different words, and the sentence has two different connotations.
You certainly know the more common chum, verb and (more often) noun. “Why so glum, chum?” “Who’ve you been chumming around with?” It’s of murky origin, but might be related to chambermate; the oldest use (from the earlier 1700s) refers to having someone as roommate: “We chummed together in university.” More recently and generally, it has come to mean ‘be on friendly terms with’; chumming around tends to imply being on widely and extravertedly friendly terms with various persons, and it often has a negative tone: “He’s been chumming around with some rather shady sorts”; “He got the contract? What do you expect – they’ve been chumming around together”; “You can tell a lot about a person by who they’re chumming with, and just look who she’s having for dinner at her place.”
You may or may not know the other chum, noun and (more often) verb. It’s from an American language, perhaps Powhatan or perhaps Chinook Jargon, and it refers to the kind of stuff you distribute in the ocean to attract sharks and other marine predators: the often rancid remnants of desecrated marine life – fish blood, fish guts, fish bits – and the distribution thereof in the water. If you’re in a fishing vessel rather than a cruise ship and you’re “chumming around,” it probably means not literally making new friends but more wryly “making new friends”: drawing the attention of sharks, bass, and similar carnivorous sea creatures.
And so you have a sort of mirror “never the twain shall meet” relation between the two: are you chumming, or are you chumming? Except… what if someone is socially baiting to attract friends who are, figuratively, sharks? Let us imagine that someone is making public statements on social media or in the press that are “just asking questions” about something that non-vicious people had settled a long time ago. “No, I’m not committing to a position; I just want to know whether you really think this kind of people are truly equal human beings.” They’re not attacking, but by raising the topic, they are treating it as an open one, one for which either answer might have some merit. And in so doing they’re attracting the responses of people who they are happy enough to be generally friendly with – they’re chumming for people to chum around with – people who approach such “debates” about the same way as sharks approach discussions over who to have for dinner.
Sesquiotica 