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Reader question: Please explain “rough and tumble”, as in “a rough and tumble career in journalism”. My comments: Don’t often see a journalist’s career described as rough and tumble, but it is certainly appropriate. Makes a lot of sense to me, at least. Rough, you see, is not smooth. A rough diamond, for instance, is one that’s not polished, with an uneven surface and rough (coarse and craggy) at the edges. To tumble, on the other hand, is to fall over, especially over and over like a gymnast. Well, when a gymnast tumbles, he does a series of summersaults and is total control. A CEO, who is late for a meeting, rushes to the door, trips over a banana skin and tumbles to the floor – that’s more like it. Picture a scene in a kindergarten room where a group of babies and kids are frolicking on the carpet. The carpet, say, a Persian rug, is rough. The kids and babies are playing with, running into and fist fighting each other and are tumbling all over the place. A poor attempt at giving an example, perhaps, but it is an attempt, and one that’s not far off the mark. After researching into the origin of “rough and tumble” as an idiom, you see, I found that this term was inspired from watching wrestlers trying to bundle opponents to the floor. There are many styles of wrestling, each with strict rules governing tactics and strategy – what you can or cannot do (with your fists, head or shoulders, for instance). And among these is the free style, wherein a wrestler is allowed to do anything he wants. Anything goes, you know. Anything you want to do you can, so long as you can wrestle your opponent to the floor. | 
