tumble

n 1: an acrobatic feat of rolling or turning end over end

2: a sudden drop from an upright position; "he had a nasty

spill on the ice" [syn: {spill}, {fall}]

v 1: fall down, as if collapsing [syn: {topple}]

2: cause to topple or tumble by pushing [syn: {topple}]

3: roll over and over, back and forth

4: fly around, as of paper on the sidewalk, or clothes in a

dryer, or rising smoke in the wind [syn: {whirl}, {skirl},

{whirl around}]

5: fall apart; also used metaphorically: "Negociations broke

down" [syn: {crumble}, {crumple}, {break down}, {collapse}]

6: throw together in a confused mass; "They tumbled the teams

with no apparent pattern"

7: understand, usually after some initial difficulty [syn: {catch

on}, {get onto}, {latch on}, {cotton on}, {twig}, {get it}]

8: fall suddenly and sharply; "Prices tumbled after the

devaluation of the currency"

9: dry clothes by putting them in tumbling barrel, where they

are whirled about in hot air; "Wash in warm water and

tumble dry"

10: suffer a sudden downfall, overthrow, or defeat

11: do gymnastics, roll and turn skillfully

mumble

1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to

enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out. Often

prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to

get into a long discussion. "Don't you think that we could

improve LISP performance by using a hybrid reference-count

transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough and

there are some extra cache bits for the {microcode} to use?"

"Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it."

2. Yet another {metasyntactic variable}, like {foo}.

3. Sometimes used in "public" contexts on-line as a

placefiller for things one is barred from giving details

about. For example, a poster with pre-released hardware in

his machine might say "Yup, my machine now has an extra 16M of

memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for Mumbleco."

4. A conversational wild card used to designate something one

doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can be

{glark}ed from context. Compare {blurgle}.

5. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further

discussion would be fruitless.

(1997-03-27)