Heard on The Judges: "bum-rush"

[Marc Velasco]

IME, bum-rush is being used as I've always heard it, as some sort of quick,
not-usually-too-fair assault.  sometimes by ambush, or blindside.  at least
that's the connotations usually surrounding it IME.



On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Heard on The Judges: "bum-rush"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Spoken by presumably European-American, standard-speaking, voice-over guy:
>
> "The plaintiff complains that the defendants' nine dogs _bum-rushed_
> his two dogs."
>
>
> I.e., one group of dogs _attacked_ another group.
>
> However, IMO, to _bum-rush_ is to _frog-walk or otherwise throw an
> undesirable patron out of a joint_ and not to attack him, whether as
> an individual or in a group. Of course, since both "bum-rush" and
> "frog-walk" are both only literary terms for me, I could very well be
> completely mistaken, here.
>
> FWIW, I've never even heard of such a thing as requiring, or even
> merely asking, a patron to leave a bar, in real life. In Jim-Crow
> days, naturally, I sometimes experienced being refused entrance to a
> watering-place, from the be-ginning. A Japanese-American friend told
> me of being refused entrance to bars in Oklahoma, when he was a
> cannon-cocker at Fort Sill, on the grounds that he was a Native
> American. Since he was always subsequently admitted, after
> demonstrating that he was neither an Indian nor black, he - and I -
> thought that some white Oklahomans really did think that he was an
> Indian. (For me, that story nailed the ceiling to the roof, WRT the
> theory that the progenitors of Native Americans emigrated from Asia.)
>
> -Wilson
> --
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -----
>  -Sam'l Clemens
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org