Tie me kangaroo up, sport
Sue de Groot THE PEDANT CLASS degroots@sundaytimes.co.za
‘UP and atom,” as Einstein used to say when he got up in the morning. Mike Croft sent me a lovely meditation on the word “up” that has been cropping up on word-loving blogs of late. In case you’re not keeping up, I have used “up” seven times up to this point.
Any comprehensive dictionary will give you a few hundred uses for “up”. Then there are all the words to which it is attached — uproar, upstanding, upmarket, uprising, Upanishads … the number of these goes up all the time.
Up comes from a lowly background. It made its way through Old High German and Old Norse to Old English, but its history does not explain its rising popularity.
Except for the Greeks, who also use their version of up for “below”, most of us understand up to mean “above” — to indicate an upwards direction. Sometimes this is true. “Look up” makes sense if you are trying to warn someone about a falling piano. To “look up” a word in the dictionary does not make sense, however, unless you’re prone to reading flat on your back with the book held up above your face. “I’ll look him up” is also mysterious. I looked up an old friend once. He was wearing a kilt. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
Most people look down when hunting (down) words in dictionaries. And most cooks put food down on plates. Gravity does not allow us to “dish up” or “serve up”, yet these are common expressions. “Serve up” drives me up the wall.
I don’t mind “clean up”. We lift rubbish and socks up in order to throw them out. “Throw up” is also directionally acceptable, since bile rises. That reminds me of the two buckets of vomit who hooked up in a pub and wandered up the road (unless of course they wandered down the road). As they clanked past an alley, one of the buckets of vomit burst into tears, pointed, and blubbered nostalgically: “I was brought up down there.”
“Brighten up” and “cheer up” are fine. They imply the raising of spirits (bourbon, top row on the left), but “listen up” is odious. Perhaps Professor Peter Higgs cocks his head to one side and listens up when godlike particles speak to him from above. The rest of us just listen.
I have no problem with “shut up” in the directional sense. It means to raise one’s bottom lip until it meets one’s top lip, preventing further sound from escaping. “Button up”, “speed up”, “speak up” and “warm up” can all be explained. “Bottoms up” is as clear as an empty bourbon glass, and even “up yours” makes directional sense. But I do not understand “start up”, “finish up”, “messed up” or “time’s up”. If you have no more of it, hasn’t your time run down? I challenge you to go through a day without using “up”. I
don’t think I’m up to it.
Thanks to Richard Linton, Melvyn Janson and Topsy Hunt for recalling Brian Johnston’s legendary blooper involving bowler Michael Holding and batsman Peter Willey. Some may have heard the reprisal, when Mike Haysman was sharing the commentary box with Michael Holding at a match umpired by Peter Willey. It gave Haysman much joy to be able to say: “The commentator’s
Holding, the umpire’s Willey.”