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rumspringa
Walking to the house the other day, I stumbled on a stepping stone, lost balance, and probably windmilled about trying to prevent a fall. In the process of tripping over my own feet, I pulled a hip muscle. Well, it's more like a muscle somewhere under the hip at the top of the back of my leg. It hurts to walk fast. I thought, "I'm rump-sprung!" The dictionaries have no definition for this term, hyphenated or not.
It came to mind again when I started to watch the UPN's Amish in the City, where the supposedly Amish were doing their "rumspringa" in L.A. Although I've lived around Amish and read about them all my life, I hadn't heard either the term or the practice. I suspected it was more "made up for TV" junk entertainment. I looked through a few of my books about the Amish and Mennonites and found nothing similar. A superficial surf on the Internet yielded enough potentially credible results like this:
"Rumspringa is a Pennsylvania Dutch term that means "running around." The word also refers to the Amish rite of passage in which many Amish teens aged 16 and older are given the freedom to explore the outside "English" world before deciding whether to get baptized and join the Amish church or to continue living life in modern society. *Sources include 800padutch.com and religioustolerance.org"
There's also a possibly authentic interview with a possibly authentic "authority on the Amish" on the Beliefnet website. I'm hesitant to recommend resources I don't know, especially ones that feature much advertising and "soulmate" matchmaking services.
Listen to this article
It came to mind again when I started to watch the UPN's Amish in the City, where the supposedly Amish were doing their "rumspringa" in L.A. Although I've lived around Amish and read about them all my life, I hadn't heard either the term or the practice. I suspected it was more "made up for TV" junk entertainment. I looked through a few of my books about the Amish and Mennonites and found nothing similar. A superficial surf on the Internet yielded enough potentially credible results like this:
"Rumspringa is a Pennsylvania Dutch term that means "running around." The word also refers to the Amish rite of passage in which many Amish teens aged 16 and older are given the freedom to explore the outside "English" world before deciding whether to get baptized and join the Amish church or to continue living life in modern society. *Sources include 800padutch.com and religioustolerance.org"
There's also a possibly authentic interview with a possibly authentic "authority on the Amish" on the Beliefnet website. I'm hesitant to recommend resources I don't know, especially ones that feature much advertising and "soulmate" matchmaking services.
Listen to this article
posted by Georganna Hancock M.S. | 10:42 AM
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