to ride someone's bumper
- phrasal verb
- Informal
:
pegarse
- The driver behind me was riding my bumper even though I was already at the speed limit.
Examples
-
She gets nervous when someone starts to ride her bumper on the highway.
-
It's dangerous to ride someone's bumper, especially in heavy traffic.
-
It's dangerous to ride someone's bumper when you are driving in heavy traffic.
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She felt anxious as the car behind her began to ride her bumper on the highway.
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The driver aggressively rides my bumper, making me feel unsafe on the road.
Synonyms
11
5.6
To drive too close behind another vehicle and risk a crash
To drive in a very dangerous way that puts other people at risk
To make a car go very fast and in a dangerous way
Antonyms
How Close
Surface Forms
Morphology
The phrase literally evokes the image of one vehicle 'riding' on another's 'bumper', so a learner who knows 'ride' and 'bumper' can plausibly infer it means following extremely closely. This is a transparent, spatially motivated composition (similar to cross-linguistic tailgating metaphors) rather than a highly idiomatic shift, so B1 learners should be able to derive the meaning from the parts.
Etymology
The phrase ride someone's bumper comes from a clear car image: a driver is so close behind another car that it looks like they are riding on the other car's bumper. So, it means to drive very close behind someone, an aggressive or 'dangerous' move on the road.