Wordcracker: Tump

If you are from the southern U.S., you may know of or actually use the verb tump. Perhaps your children use it. You won’t find it in all dictionaries, but it is a word all the same. I grew up using the word. Heck, I still use it. What does it mean? First of all, don’t waste your time with the Oxford English Dictionary. There, a tump is a clump or mound and a tump-line is a strap used by people carrying large loads on their back. It goes across the forehead to help them better manage the load. (My O.E.D. is old; perhaps it has been amended.)

On the web, you’ll find a lot of incomplete answers. A site I like, Word Detective, has an entry about it, and although the writer finally touches on the actual meaning, he still seems to be scratching his head. The online dictionary Encarta says it means to overturn; to knock over. This is an unacceptable oversimplification.

Although a bit of a mystery for even the experts, it’s clear to me that tump is a combination of the words tip and dump. I have also seen theories that it is a combination of turn and dump. If I were writing my own dictionary, my definition would be something along the lines of:

Tumping is a violent or consequential tipping over of something.

That consequence is usually something being spilled or dumped. So although a kid might merely tip over his empty glass, he would tump it over if it had milk in it. You might tip over an upright domino, but you would tump over a kid on his tricycle.

You could tip over a kid on his bike or even knock him over, but there’s the chance that he could catch himself with his foot. Tump him over and can’t you just hear his little body thump against the sidewalk?

You might also tump over anything that is big or heavy, whether anything is actually spilled or not. For example, you might tip over a toy, but you would tump over the wheelbarrow to check a tire.

Sure you can turn over a wheelbarrow. But to me that requires a certain amount of control. A more careful deliberate action. Tump over a wheel barrow and you get the gravity of it. Less control, more weight. When you put down anything particularly heavy or big, there is a certain amount of dumping going on, isn’t there, the not-so-careful placing of the object because, well, because it is big and heavy. Dump those boxes over there, we might say.

What self-respecting, high-flying Southerner hasn’t tumped a swing set over?

Also, tumping can just happen. A wheelbarrow can suddenly tump over because it is loaded poorly. Nobody actually has to knock it over.

I love words and phrases like tump over and fixing to because they seem to fill a void left by our “proper” vocabulary. They uniquely express something that no other word or phrase quite gets right.

Although I love the word, I could never use “tump” in my professional writing. Not because it is slang. I’m not so sure it is. But, obviously, it is not universal enough and, as a result, sounds uneducated, even rednecked.

I come by it honestly, though. When I was little, my mother, who is of Scottish stock, called a thing with stripes on it “stri-ped.” She has since reformed. But this is an Elizabethan pronunciation that still lives in parts of Appalachia where many Scotch-Irish settled, and apparently to some extent in other parts of the South (my mom is from Memphis). For years I said stri-ped, too. As in, “Mama, can I have s’more ice-tea and a paper tow’l; I just tumped over my strip-ed Dixie cup.”

Man, have I come a long way. Now I tump over my Chardonnay.