noun
a person who sees the gloomy side of things; pessimist. Also, crepehanger.
Examples:
Ordinarily Encore would have suggested, with amiable malice, that Gottlieb was a "crapehanger" who wasted time destroying the theories of other men instead of making new ones of his own.
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith, 1925
I don’t like to be--what my people sometimes call a crapehanger--but Teff-el was to have been crushed by the new ships equipped with the transpon beam and the magnetic and gravity bombs.
John W. Campbell, The Mightiest Machine, 1947
Origin:
Crapehanger is an Americanism with roots in the custom of hanging crepe paper as a sign of mourning. It came into popular usage in the 1920s.
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