Photo credit: emilysmucker.com
Last Friday was indeed eventful and provided rich pickings in terms of words and phrases for this blog. After a somewhat tough week my husband and I went to one of our favourite pubs (giving a few others a miss – one too posh and one with no food and some very dubious music). We spent a great evening there and when it was time to go and I stood up my chair suddenly overturned with a lot of noise – it’s not that I was drunk, it’s just that there was too much hanging on it. One of the guys at the next table was particularly startled – I apologized profusely, to which his girlfriend said ‘It’s ok, he’s always been quite jumpy‘.
‘Jumpy‘ means ‘nervous and worried, especially because you are frightened or guilty’ (Cambridge Online Dictionary).
This is how it can be used:
– My mother gets very jumpy when she’s alone in the house (Cambridge Online Dictionary).
– Politicians the world over get a bit jumpy when people start looking through their expenses claims (BBC).
– In Whitehall, Toby Bell, newly appointed private secretary to Fergus Quinn, is feeling jumpy. He too has read the three-sentence description of his new boss and can tell he is a baddy (The Guardian).
Confessions of the Linguistic Spy 