release date: 30 august 2022 R
ecently I made a small kinetic instrument from a ball carved out of a champagne cork rolling around inside a rotating biscuit tin. Watching the roughly shaped ball bounce and hobble about inside the cylinder I got to thinking about the word tumble and how I’ve often expressed a sense of tumbling through life, rather than purposefully shaping a trajectory of progressive improvement. T
umble of course conjures a scene and a sense of suddenly falling, with or without control or intention. The unlucky, the inattentive and the trained acrobat alike can take a tumble. It’s a word used frequently in reference to things economic, such as the advice ‘sell into rallies, buy when markets tumble’.
A phonaestheme is a phonic sequence that suggests a particular meaning and there does seem to be some semantic thread stitching together the many umble words of the English language. A run through the alphabet yields bumble, crumble, fumble, grumble, humble, jumble, mumble, rumble, scumble, stumble, tumble and umbles - edible animal intestines. Maybe even dumbbell at a stretch.
There’s meaning overlap amongst them all, of incoherent noise, mild disparagement, lack of success or control, momentary disorder or incoherence. And one might expect the umble words to have some common etymological ancestor but apparently not. Instead, they derive variously from different sources in old english, proto-germanic, old norse, middle dutch, middle french and so on.
In 1980, Talking Heads released the album Remain in Light, featuring the energetic cryptolyrical opening track "Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” with David Byrne’s emphatic announcement ‘I’m a tumbler’. Forty years on the song maintains its hypnotic allure.
Four hundred years prior, Shakespeare dropped tumbles into many a players exposition, and René Descartes became anxious about his meditations on what can truly be known about our existence. Tumblers are a performative breed of pigeon that chaotically twist and turn in flight.
Botanically speaking, Tumbleweed is a descriptor for wind-dispersed diaspores of many various xerophytic plants. Culturally, the Tumbleweed as signifier has morphed from a trope of Western cinema to a meme for a moment of empty awkwardness or awkward emptiness.
And then there’s Tumblr.com the American web platform founded in 2007 on the gamble that users might enjoy tumbling through cascades of brief texts and images micro-curated by fellow users. A rewarding prescient insight that was…
