I overheard a colleague tell a second colleague that a third colleague had told the first colleague that the third colleague was going to do something otherwise than by standard procedures. The first colleague then said:
If he does that, I’ll jump on him like a ton of bricks.
My first thought was that bricks don’t jump, even a ton of them.
At home I first searched for jump ton bricks (without quotation marks), which found no exact uses of the expression in any form, but, not surprisingly, dictionary entries and uses of be/come (down) on sb like a ton of bricks, hit sb like a ton of bricks and jump down sb’s throat. Searching again for “jump on him like a ton of bricks” (with quotation marks for an exact match) found a small number of exact uses, as did most combinations with jumped, me, you, her, it, us, them, someone and somebody. I was surprised to find that some people even jump on it like a ton of bricks.
So I’ll say that jump on sb like a ton of bricks is used, just not very much. Pre-internet, would there have been any way of finding those?
(Would anyone say “The wall came down on him like a ton of bricks”, or is that too literal?)
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 