Heard on The Judges; more "jump on"

[Scot LaFaive]

This is new to me. So when Judge Mathis asked if he had "jumped on" her, he
was asking if he had assaulted her but not assaulted her in a way that would
threaten her life? Basically, whether or not he had "thrown a beating" on
her.

Scot

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 9:26 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Heard on The Judges; more "jump on"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Forty-ish Northern white male plaintiff speaking:
>
> "[My brother] got into a fight with his wife and she had him arrested,
> your honor."
>
> Judge Mathis:
>
> "Did he _jump on_ her?"
>
> Speaker:
>
> "No, your honor. He tried to hit her with a tire iron."
>
> Judge Mathis:
>
> "You right he didn't _jump on_ her! He tried to *murder* her!"
>
> My intuition is that the white speaker interpreted _jump on_ as
> referring to a literal "jump" on the wife. That wasn't what happened
> in the literal sense, the brother having used a tire iron, so he
> answered no in a situation in which a black or Southern speaker also
> most likely would have answered no. But the black/Southern speaker
> would have said no not because the brother didn't *literally* _jump
> on_ his wife, but because trying to hit her with a tire iron goes way
> beyond a mere _jump on_, as the judge notes.
>
> -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
>
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