Tumbarumba

Tumbarumba is not to be confused with Chumbawamba, a band made famous for getting knocked down but getting up again. “You’re never,” representatives of the band assured us when called upon to comment, “going to keep us down.”

Chubby wombat, like Tumbarumba, sounds like Chumbawamba and comes from Australia.

A town in New South Wales, Australia with a scanty population of just under 1,500 people in 2006,[i] Tumbarumba is famous for its annual Beer Drinking Tournament, Croc-Wrestling Competition, Bar Brawl Invitational, Australian Stereotype Convention, and for not being famous. The most intriguing thing about Tumbarumba is the name itself. It’s rhythmic. It’s rhyming. It has a deep, primitive sound and feel to it; evocative of wild, untamable words like tumble, rumble and of the sound of thunder. Tumbarumba sounds like the verbal embodiment of outback Australia, similar to the American equivalent Podunk. Qualities which make it strangely onomatopoeic. But Tumbarumba’s real claim to fame comes from its being featured in an Australian poem.

But before we can get there, we must leave the  Australian outback and first travel back to Ancient Greece and Rome, where most stories involving words have their start. In Ancient Greek there was a rhetorical technique called tmesis, meaning ‘to cut.’ Tmesis involved splitting a word into two pieces and sticking another word in the middle for emphasis. The Romans, ever fond of rhetoric, picked up the habit as well and passed it on to their many linguistic children, both legitimate (Spanish) and illegitimate (English).

Immanuel Kant

If there’s anything English speakers love besides arguing about the pronunciation of “can’t” and “bath,” it’s prefixes and suffixes. We cram prefixes and suffixes onto words almost haphazardly to produce all manner of new words and to change the forms of existing words to suit our purposes. But there’s a third affix that goes almost entirely ignored in English known as the infix. It works much like a prefix or a suffix, but instead of sticking it on the beginning or end of a word, it gets crammed in the middle. There are very few examples of infixes in English, and they are all or nearly all considered informal and tend to be used by marginal groups in society.

A young Saddam Hussein and other members of the Ba'ath Party

A prime example would be the infix -iz- which is used almost exclusively by the hip hop community and only occasionally by lame white people who desperately want street cred, even though — if they’re anything like this lame white person — they’re not even sure what street cred is or what it involves. Some uses of the infix -iz- are:

house  –> hizouse
chain –> chizain
Mouri –> Missouri

Tmesis is a similar concept to infixes, but instead of putting an affix in the middle of a word, tmesis involves putting an entire word in the middle of another word. It’s like a verbal Dagwood sandwich. Tmesis is also considered informal in English, and so as with infixes, is generally employed by marginal groups in society. The marginalization of tmesis is only exacerbated by the fact that it is most commonly used with profanity. Fortunately, it’s almost as common to use euphemisms, and so we’ll do so here. We recommend you do the same. For the children.

A Dagwood sandwich

The first and probably the most common example of tmesis is freaking. If you’re from the UK or Australia, simply substitute freaking with bloody and you get the idea. The initial f and hard k sound, plus its seemingly infinite applicability, make freaking (and its obscene counterpart) the ideal emphasis word. Observe the examples below.

fantastic –> fan-freaking-tastic

absolutely –> abso-freaking-lutely

unbelievable –> unbe-freaking-lievable

la-di-da –> la-di-freaking-da

Vietnam –> Viet-freaking-nam

antidisestablishmentarianism –> antidisestablishmen-freaking-tarianism

Another, more Southern example is old.

anytime –> any-old-time

anyplace –> any-old-place

anywhere –> any-old-where

One of my favourites is the insertion of whole into another as in:

another issue –> a whole nother issue.

If you want to be really annoying you can use -toota- as in:

absolutely –> abso-toota-lutely.

Tmesis can be used with any number of words, both expletives and pletives[ii], as fits the occasion. You can even fit an entire phrase or sentence into a word if you’re feeling adventurous. As in:

Becky Mc-I think I’m better than everyone else at the firm just because I graduated from Harvard and I drive a Lexus, even though my dad’s money paid for all of it-freaking-Callister.

The problem any developing trend in language faces is that unless it enters regular usage by the population of an entire nation, it’s not very likely to remain a permanent fixture. So when you have something as marginalized and often crass as tmesis tends to be, it would take an entire country of marginalized and often crass English speakers to popularize it. In other words: Australia. And that brings us back to Tumbarumba and its claim to fame.

Apparently, there was a poem written not too long ago by an Australian author and poet named John O’Grady[iii] entitled Tumba Bloody Rumba. I won’t include the poem here in its entirety, partly because its frequent use of the word bloody may offend some. Suffice it to say, the poem makes ample use of colourful tmesis with words such as “Tumba-bloody-rumba” and “kanga-bloody-roos.”

The result, thanks in no small part to the almost hypnotic power of the word, is that tumbarumba has now become a synonym for tmesis in the English language.

'I see you've played knifey spoony before!'

Not only is tumbarumba a fan-freaking-tastic addition to the English language, it also may very well be the only real contribution the Australians ever make to global English as a whole. I mean, unless you count “That’s not a knife. This is a knife.” And, granted, I’m tempted to out of nostalgia for the 80s. But there’s no way any of us will ever have another use for the words ‘Yahoo Serious,’ as awesome as Young Einstein was. And does anyone even know what a billabong is? If so, is it even legal to own one?

Using tumbarumba isn’t going to get you any job offers or endear you to the ladies/the gentlemen, but that’s not its purpose anyway. Tumbarumba is a cultural ambassador, like the koala bear and Mel Gibson – a token of amity and fraternity from Australia to the rest of the English-speaking world. Like all things Australian, tumbarumba has the power to add spice and adventure to your life. So let’s do as the Australians do, if only this once, and spice up our vocabu-flipping-lary with a little tumbarumba.

Yahoo at his most Serious

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[i] http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au/ABSNavigation/prenav/LocationSearch?collection=Census&period=2006&areacode=UCL176000&producttype=QuickStats&breadcrumb=PL&action=401

[ii] Inpletives? Impletives?

[iii] I could find nothing concrete online confirming Mr. O’Grady as the author of the poem. And unlike Yale University, I’m not comfortable using Wikipedia as a sole source of my information. See Yale University Library’s blurb on O’Grady here.