tumbling
n.— «Some Irish were able to buy tickets out of the country. “They were going to be driven off the land because they were unable to pay rent when the crops failed.…The landlord would come with a constable and do what is known as tumbling, they’d burn the house to the ground. If another neighbor took them in they’d be burned too.”» —“The mark of the Irish on N.H.” by Jeanné McCartin Seacoastonline.com (New Hampshire) Mar. 15, 2008. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Enthusiastic book recommendations! Martha’s savoring the biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the 19th-century explorer, polymath, and naturalist who revolutionized our understanding of nature and predicted the effects of human activity on...
Is Murphy’s Law, or the idea that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong,” a slur against the Irish? This is part of a complete episode.
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