Tump

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Laura from Louisville, Kentucky.

Why, hi Laura, how you doing?

All right, Laura.

Okay, well Martha, I’m sure that you’ve heard this word before because you’re from Louisville.

-huh.

But my husband has always made fun of it. He’s not from Louisville.

And whenever he hears my family use it, he just looks at us like we’re crazy.

And it’s the word tump.

As in, hey, be careful, don’t tump over my Coke.

Mm—

Or, you know, don’t tump over the chair.

Right.

And my husband’s from southern Illinois, and he’s never heard the word before until he moved here.

He thinks we’re crazy.

He’s brought it up with his family and other people he knows.

And if they’re not from around here, they have no idea what we’re talking about.

Laura, you’re right, you’re right, you’re right.

This is a really important word to me.

I had the very same experience.

I grew up in Louisville.

I moved to upstate New York to go to college.

And the first time I used the word tump, I think I was talking about tumping over a canoe or something.

People laughed at me it was shocking to me that they had never heard the word tump and that

That not only did they not know the word but they thought it was hilarious and i don’t know laura

For me it was sort of this splash of cold water that was thrilling at the same moment because

Because i think i hadn’t realized that there were actually words like that that would be so foreign

To somebody in the same country.

Well, and for me, my husband’s, like I said, from southern Illinois.

He’s only about three hours away.

-huh, -huh.

But they have a completely different language and a completely different accent.

Yeah, and I think that the accent thing we glom onto early in life,

But the fact that tump would be completely unintelligible to somebody

In another part of the country.

Well, completely, but surely from context they can tell what you mean.

Well, yeah, okay, not completely unintelligible,

But they laughed at me, and they laughed at you too, Laura, right?

Exactly. And you still laugh at us.

Yeah, sister. I just want to throw my arms around you.

And I’ve had this experience with other people from the South.

We feel the same way.

Grant, it’s true. You didn’t grow up with Tom.

No, I believe you. I believe you.

It’s your passion that’s making me giggle.

Well, where did this word come from?

How did we make it up?

There was an innovator lost in history, but more than likely, Martha.

I believe it comes as a dialect pronunciation of Thump, T-H-U-M-P.

Well, you know, I’ve seen all kinds of different explanations.

It could come from that.

It could be a combination of tip and dump or turn and dump.

I mean, you sort of get the idea from the word, don’t you?

It sounds similar to some of the other words that mean roughly the same thing, right?

Yeah.

Because my family has had discussions about where it came from now.

And what do they think?

Oh, my aunt thinks it’s from maybe tip and dump.

Yeah.

My mom says maybe tumble and dump.

-huh.

I’ve seen that.

I’ve seen that, too.

If you look it up in the dictionary, in my dictionary from college, it’s not in there.

Oh, really?

As that definition, there’s like a tump that means a clump of vegetation or something.

Right, right. That’s exactly it.

In my daughter’s new dictionary, which is several editions later,

Storwell Webster’s Dictionary, our version of tump is in there, Martha.

It is?

Yes.

Yeah, it is in the Merrim-Webster Dictionary.

You’ll find it in the unabridged at least, and it might be in the collegiate dictionary.

The new collegiate is what I have.

There we go.

And it’s both a transitive and intransitive verb.

That means you can just tump.

I tumped.

I mean, I fell over.

Or you can tump something.

I tumped over the barrel.

It means I turned over and spilled the barrel.

And it’s marked as chiefly Southern, which I completely agree with.

If you look in the books, you’ll find again and again and again that it’s Southern authors using this word.

Southern.

Almost strictly.

I mean, it just probably stops cold at the Mason-Dixon line.

Okay.

So I say use it in good health.

Oh, I use it all the time.

It doesn’t bother me that he doesn’t know what it is

Because there’s other words that they make fun of when I say them also.

Well, Laura, thank you for reminding me of that word.

I love that word.

It just makes me want to tump over everything in the studio right now,

Just so I can say the word tump.

Well, now that you’ve been reminded of it again, you can use it all the time.

All right.

Well, thanks for calling, Laura.

Talk to you later.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Well, the two of you, why don’t you just appear?

Call us with your hometown words, those things that you think make you who you are.

We’d love to hear about them.

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That’s 1-877-Wayword.