Southern Vocabulary

At the risk of initiating a world-killing trackback death spiral, I refer you to a post over at The Fat Guy’s joint (link no longer works, so use your imagination), where he skillfully inserts the word “tump” into a sentence about lattes.

I’ve used “tump” as a verb for years without thinking about it, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it in writing. And upon seeing it, I now wonder about its etymology (score another for my “big words” New Year’s resolution!). My guess is that it’s a combination of tumble and bump, but that’s just me. So I went a’googlin’ to see if there was a more scholarly explanation.

The American Heritage Dictionary’s entry for tump seemed to indicate that I wasn’t that far afield, although it was hardly definitive (pun intended!), saying that the etymology was probably akin to tumble.

But what I thought was extremely cool, showing that someone either has a sense of humor, or is pretty dang good at pinpoint marketing, was the sponsoring ad that showed up in the right margin of the page.

How’d they know that anyone interested in the word “tump” would be from Texas? Brilliant!