to jump off a bridge

1 8.2

To do something dangerous or foolish because other people do it

idiom

Informal

: saltar de un puente

My parents always said, 'Just because others do it, don't jump off a bridge yourself.'

Examples

Don't jump off a bridge just because your friends are doing it!
Asking me to jump off a bridge makes as much sense as following every silly trend.
If your friends told you to jump off a bridge, would you do it?
Why would you jump off a bridge like that?
If everyone else is doing something foolish, would you jump off a bridge just to fit in?
My friend said he would never jump off a bridge just because everyone else was doing it.
Sometimes people follow the crowd and jump off a bridge, even when it's a bad idea.

Antonyms

to think twice

Informal

107 3.6

Carefully consider something before you act to avoid a mistake

Surface Forms

jump off a bridge infinitive

Morphology

jump + off + a + bridge

The literal sense ('to leap off a bridge') is directly derivable from the constituents, but the common idiomatic use as a rhetorical question meaning 'would you follow others blindly or do something obviously foolish because others do' is a pragmatic/metaphorical extension rather than a purely compositional meaning. This conventionalized rhetorical use may be partially inferable from context but is not fully predictable to a B1 learner who only knows the individual words, so the MWE is best classified as semi-transparent.

Etymology

The idiom jump off a bridge creates a clear image of someone jumping off a bridge into danger just because other people did it. So when people say this, they mean 'would you do something foolish just because others do'.