"Jump on"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Oct 6 17:07:56 UTC 2008


For the umpteenth time, I've heard "jump on" used in the wild in the
Bill Clinton sense by non-Southerners -  this time, a mid-twenty-ish,
white woman from California:

"He was going to _jump on_ me, but he found himself on the floor after
I broke the telephone over his head"

so that I still find it passing strange that the NYT and other
Northern screeds ever reacted to it as a really weird expression. I
can't believe that Clinton introduced the phrase to the
English-speaking world.

-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.
-----
-Mark Twain

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



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