bheine.net

Ben Heine: web communications and digital operations in Birmingham, AL

Tump, and Other Words the South Kept

Tump means to tip something over. “Don't tump that bucket.” “The cat tumped the water glass.” It works the other way too: the sailboat tumped over. It is chiefly Southern, and it is the kind of word you can go years without noticing is regional.

Cat Funny GIF

Tumping, as practiced by cats. GIF via Tenor.

Where it comes from

Nobody knows for sure, and there are really two words here that happen to be spelled the same.

The older one is a noun, tump, meaning a small mound or hillock. Wiktionary compares it to Welsh twmp, Merriam-Webster dates that sense to 1589, and the American Heritage Dictionary adds a clump of trees, shrubs or grass.

The verb, the one Southerners use, is murkier. Merriam-Webster hedges: perhaps akin to the British dialect word tumpoke, to fall head over heels. A popular guess is that it blends tip and dump, which is tidy and unproven. Wiktionary notes both ideas as possibilities and nothing more.

There is also a third tump, unrelated: a shortening of mattump, possibly from a Penobscot word descended from Proto-Algonquian wetempi, “head.” It names the tumpline, a strap across the forehead for carrying a load.

Other words the South kept

Tump is in good company. Southern English is a mix of older British and Scots-Irish speech, West African languages, and things that were simply coined here. A few with documented histories:

  • Goober (peanut): recorded in 1833, from Kikongo and Kimbundu nguba. Peanuts crossed from South America to Africa on Portuguese ships, and the word came back across the Atlantic with them.
  • Tote (to carry): first recorded in Virginia in the 1670s. A popular theory ties it to Kikongo tota or Kimbundu tuta, but the OED discounts that. The real origin is unknown.
  • Y’all: you all is documented in 1824, and the contraction by 1879. English has used “all” to mark a plural you since Middle English.
  • Catawampus (crooked, askew): an adverb in 1834, meaning askew by 1864, and “in a diagonal position” in North Carolina dialect in 1873. The etymology may be cater, to move diagonally, plus a Scots word, wampish. Or a joke.
  • Might could: a double modal, as in “we might could try that.” Standard English doesn’t allow it, and scholars trace it to Scots and Ulster Scots.

Notice how many of those origin stories end with “possibly” or “nobody knows.” That is normal for spoken words. Written records come late, and dictionaries can only date the first time someone wrote a word down, not the first time someone said it.

It is the opposite of embiggen, which was made up in a writers' room and can be traced to the week it was invented. Tump and its neighbors were never invented at all. They accumulated, and each one has a history that gets fuzzier the further back you push.

Sources