Giant coffee cup, about to tump over!
{ Posted on Apr 03 2008 by admin }
AHHHHHHGGGHHGHH! EVERYBODY GET OUT OF THE WAY! There’s a freakishly large cup of coffee up there, and it’s about to tump over, spilling god-knows-how-much scalding hot liquid on whomever is below! MOVE OUT OF THE WAY!
And yes, “tump” is a word. It’s an intransitive verb, meaning “to fall over.” I totally looked it up.
Shouldn’t you have simply said “about to tump?” Wouldn’t “tump over” mean “fall over over?” Like ATM machine? Or PIN number? Am I a pedant? I believe I am!
Isn’t there one of these at Lynn’s Cafe?
brundlefly: No, “tump” is always used with “over.” I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, one of the few places where the phrase is in common use. “That trash can tumped over.” “Watch it, you’re about to tump over my CoCola!”
The liquid in the cup will be tumped out (frequently more emphatically “tumped out all over the place”) after the cup itself is tumped over. You can also skip the verb particle altogether in some cases, like “Careful, you’re fixin’ to tump the paint right out of that bucket.”
Tump is kinda like tumble and spill mixed together.
In Austin, we use it as a way of detecting the origin of other Texans:
* Houstonians and folks from East Texas know tump.
* People from Dallas give you a funny look when you use it.
Other tips for using tump fluently:
* Kids can get tumped off of a tricycle or a swing. Adults, however, do not get tumped off a bike.
* Tumping is almost always inconsequential, so you never say that a cargo ship had tumped oil into the Gulf. (So in the example above, the bucket full of paint is being carried in the backyard, not carried across the living room carpet.)