Learn how to use the verb "Jump"
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| Hi, everybody! Welcome back to Know Your Verbs. My name is Alisha. And in this lesson, we're going to talk about the verb "jump." Let's get started. |
| Let's start with the basic definition of this verb. |
| The basic definition is “to push up into the air suddenly using the legs.” |
| Examples… |
| “Jump as high as you can!” |
| “He jumped into the lake.” |
| Okay, now, let’s look at the conjugations for this verb. |
| Present: jump, jumps |
| Past: jumped |
| Past Participle: jumped |
| Progressive: jumping |
| Now, let’s talk about some additional meanings for this verb. The first additional meaning is “to react with a quick motion when surprised.” |
| Some examples…. |
| “I jumped when the cat ran into the room.” |
| “She always jumps when watching horror movies.” |
| So, this use of “jump” does not mean actually, like pushing yourself into the air with your legs. This does not mean it at all. Actually, this means when we feel surprised or shocked, our body makes a quick motion. So, I’m sure everybody has experienced this at some point in time when you are surprised by something, a surprise noise or a scary movie, for example, and you react with this quick “Huh!” motion. We use jump to describe that motion. |
| So, in the first example sentence, “I jumped when the cat came into the room,” the cat surprised the speaker and the speaker jumped, made a quick motion of surprise, like in some way. So maybe each person has a slightly different way of jumping, but it doesn’t mean actually pushing into the air with your legs. |
| In the second example sentence, “She always jumps when watching horror movies,” it means when watching these scary movies and something surprising happens, she always reacts, like with a quick motion with the body like of surprise or shock. |
| So, again, it’s not jumping off the ground, but it’s that very fast, like a surprised or shocked reaction to something. We use the verb “jump” to talk about this. |
| The next additional meaning is “to move in an irregular way.” |
| Some examples… |
| “He’s been jumping from job to job for years.” |
| “The story jumped all over the place: I couldn’t understand it.” |
| So, this use of “jump,” again, does not actually physically mean jumping, but it does refer to moving in a way that’s not always the same. |
| In the first example sentence, “He jumped from job to job,” we see, like this kind of irregular motion. Someone who changes jobs a lot is often called a “job hopper.” “Hop” is another word for “jump.” It’s like a small jump is a hop. So, “job hopping” can also be described as jumping from job to job. So that means you’re changing jobs a lot. That means that his jobs don’t necessarily follow a straight career path, like he has a plan. I’m gonna do Job A, Job B, and Job C. Instead, the idea here is he’s jumping from job to job that maybe like there’s no pattern here. There’s no sort of like path he’s taking. He’s just moving around a lot. It’s irregular. It’s not so planned. |
| In the second example sentence, it’s about a story. So, “The story jumps around a lot, I couldn’t understand it,” again, means that the story does not follow a clear path, like the story is difficult to understand because the story is not told, like in a straightforward, clear way. Instead, we see maybe a lot of different points of view in the story, so it’s difficult to understand because in one chapter, we learned about this character, in the next chapter, this and that, so it’s difficult to understand. When we see these kinds of stories or these kinds of movies, we say the story jumps around a lot, so it’s difficult to understand. So this use of “jump” refers to irregular movement or irregular like movement in the story. |
| Let’s move along to the next additional meaning. |
| The next additional meaning is “to suddenly attack someone (physically or verbally).” |
| Examples… |
| “Don’t jump on me for one small mistake!” |
| “A friend of mine got jumped outside a bar last week!” |
| So, here we see, actually, a couple of different ways that “jump” can be used to refer to an attack. |
| In the first example sentence, we see, “Don’t jump on me for one small mistake.” We will often see, “jump on” (someone) for making a mistake. This use of “jump” with “on” actually refers to a verbal attack so some kind of criticism. So if I make a mistake, it worked, and my boss gets really angry with me, I can say, like “Don’t jump on me for one small mistake.” So, again, the boss is not physically jumping on me, but verbally giving like a sudden attack or a sudden criticism of someone. We can say “jump on” to describe that. |
| In the second example sentence, however, we actually see a reference to a physical attack, a sudden physical attack. So, “My friend got jumped outside a bar last week” means my friend was attacked outside a bar last week. We use “jump.” Jump is kind of a slang-ish word here, but we use “jumped” instead of “attack” because jump sounds more sudden. So, “attack” could be a planned sort of thing, but when we use the verb “jump,” it sounds like there was no plan. It was just a sudden attack, a sudden physical attack. So, you’ll notice here we don’t say, like “My friend got jumped (on) by a criminal.” We don’t use that. When it’s a physical attack like this, “My friend got jumped outside a bar last week.” |
| Let’s move along to the next additional meaning then. |
| The next additional meaning is “to increase suddenly.” |
| Some examples… |
| “Sales of our new product jumped last month!” |
| “The number of cancer-related deaths jumped last year.” |
| So in both of these example sentences, I’ve used the examples relating to data, to information. This is quite common in talking about numbers, amounts, that sort of thing. |
| In the first example sentence, “Sales of our new product jumped last month,” “jumped” there refers to the number of sales of our product. So, we don’t say numbers, anything like that, just sales. But because sales is the subject there, we see that that’s the thing that increased suddenly. “Jumped,” you can kind of imagine like when you jump in the air, something increases suddenly or moves up suddenly. In this case, the subject of the sentence is sales so, “sales jumped last month” means sales increased suddenly last month. |
| In the second example sentence, it’s about cancer-related deaths, so, “The number of cancer-related deaths jumped last year,” meaning, again, the number of deaths, in this case, we do see number actually used in the subject of the sentence, the number of cancer-related deaths increased suddenly last year. |
| So, you’ll see this used a lot in data, information, perhaps in news as well. A fun point, you’ll also hear the verb “spike” used in this way so data spikes because of the shape of the data. So when there’s sudden increases, it creates this shape which looks like a spike. So you might hear “spike” used to talk about increased amounts of something as well. Anyway, a fun bonus point, okay. |
| Let’s continue on to some variations with this verb then. |
| The first variation is “to jump ship.” |
| to jump ship |
| “To jump ship” means “to leave or stop doing something (usually a job), and especially without notice.” |
| So, some examples… |
| “75% of the team jumped ship when the CEO was arrested.” |
| “He’s started thinking about jumping ship.” |
| So this expression, “to jump ship,” usually means to leave your job and I’ve included it there, “especially without notice,” so it’s common to use this expression for very suddenly leaving a job. |
| So, why the expression “jump ship”? The history of this expression comes from boats, like sailboats. So a sailor on a sailboat suddenly decides they don’t want to be there anymore or it’s very dangerous or they need to leave the situation. The only way to do that is to physically jump off of the ship. |
| So, “to jump ship” means like to leave your job to leave your post very quickly, very suddenly and without notice sometimes, without telling your boss, in other words. |
| So, in the first example sentence, “75% of the team jumped ship when the CEO was arrested” means they suddenly left their jobs. In this case, the CEO was arrested so there’s some like big event that caused a lot of people to quickly leave their job. |
| In the second example sentence, “he’s thinking about jumping ship” means he’s considering leaving his job, like in a fairly abrupt fashion. “Abrupt” means like quickly and without like a lot of notice or a lot of information beforehand. |
| So, “to jump ship” means to leave something or to stop doing something. |
| I’ve mentioned like job-related examples here, but you might hear this in other situations where someone leaves like a relationship or some other kind of social relationship suddenly as well, but it tends to be used a lot for work. |
| Let’s move along to the next variation, which is to jump the gun. “To jump the gun” means “to act before the appropriate time.” |
| Some examples… |
| “I jumped the gun taking my cake out of the oven. It’s ruined.” |
| “She just joined the company; isn’t she jumping the gun to be suggesting so many changes?” |
| So, “to jump the gun,” again means to act before the appropriate time. So, you do something too early, in other words and it’s a negative thing. |
| In the first example, it’s a cooking situation, so maybe I’m impatient, the speaker is impatient, “they jumped the gun taking the cake out of the oven” means they took the cake out of the oven too soon and now, it’s ruined. |
| In the second example sentence, a person who just join the company recently is suggesting a lot of changes and her co-workers or colleagues are saying, “Isn’t she jumping the gun?” Isn’t she acting a little bit too soon? It’s not appropriate for her to do that just now when she’s joined the company. |
| So, “to jump the gun” is to act too soon. So this expression also has an interesting history. This comes from sports, actually. When doing like running events, for example, the race would start by someone shooting a gun. So, the gun would make a sound to signal the start of the race. If a runner started before the gunshot, it’s like they make a jumping motion and they go before the official start of the race. In other words, they’re acting too soon. So the expression “to jump the gun” continues into other aspects of life, other parts of life to mean acting before the correct time or before the appropriate time. Very interesting. |
| So, I hope that you learned a few new ways of using the verb “jump.” If you have any questions or comments or if you know a different way of using the verb “jump,” please let us know in the comment section of this video. |
| Thanks very much for watching this episode of Know Your Verbs and we will see you again soon. Bye-bye! |
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