Posted on 02/24/2018 9:45:32 AM PST by V K Lee
English is weird, hard to learn, and often hard to translate.
An article on this showed UP in my email inbox this week, and I thought I’d share it with you. While I didn't dream it UP, I found out, after looking it UP on the web, that the article's content might originally come from here. I enjoyed reading UP on it, and I made UP the parallel between the uses of the word and localization. (It gets worse from here).
UP can be a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and preposition. This two-letter word in English has more meanings than any other two-letter word. If you were to check, it is listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].
It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but consider these things.
We wake UP
At a meeting, topics come UP
People speak UP It is UP to the secretary to write UP a report
We call UP our friends
We take UP with the wrong crowd
You can brighten UP a room
We polish UP the silverware
I warm UP the leftovers and then I clean UP the kitchen
We lock UP the house
People fix UP the old car
My sister always stirs UP trouble
We line UP for tickets
She works UP an appetite
You think UP excuses
(Excerpt) Read more at info.moravia.com ...
James Brown sings Sex Machine:
“Get On UP!!”
And yes, adults only, NSFM, etc.
Generally it is used to indicate going from a lower to a higher energy state. In literal terms, to gain gravitational potential energy by gaining altitude. Metaphorically, to increase in order vs. disorder. To decrease the entropy in a system. “clean up a room” for example.
Don’t leave out “The UP”: that portion of Michigan cut off from the mitten by the Straits of Mackinac!
English is weird indeed.
We drive on a parkway and park in a drive way also in counting why isn’t there a teenteen eveventeen and a twelveteen?.
I’ve wondered if the naming convention isn’t an archaic survival of a prior base 12 system, myself.
Did you make this UP?
“Up” is the opposite of “down”, but “burned up” is generally synonymous with “burned down”.
Saw a skit where a guy told an sjw interviewer his name was Henderson and the guy got all offended and said that’s a SEXIST name and called him Mr. Henderperson the rest of the interview. Not that person is any better now that I think about it, it still has the word ‘son’ in it.
Yes, like a whore’s licence. Apparently the word stuck. I think there are some other sources it came from too, can’t remember now.
Then you consider that the vowels ‘i’ and ‘u’ require the diphthongs of ‘i-e’ and ‘o-u’ in order to be pronounced and everything gets screwy.
Imagine a non-English speaker trying to figure out what “put up with” means.
No, I think you’re onto something. Drop the Manchest, leave the er, add an h, and call it Her. It wouldn’t be sexist if it was feminine, only masculine.
Because in olde English ‘eleven’ meant one left (after 10) and twelve meant two left (after 10). So I read or heard in a doc.
I believe tenteen is part of the previous decade of letters so the teens start at eleventeen and end with twentyteen.
Even weirder: IT’S raining, snowing, etc.
Who or what exactly is IT??? How long has IT been at this?
Is it an entity or higher power?
Or attempting to script the spoken phrase:
“There three 2s in the English language.”
To
Too
Two
It is a commonly used pronoun, a word which takes the place of a noun. In this case the condition of weather outside. IT IS RAINING for example. Do you find that weird? By the way you is a pronoun.
Construction and meaning is the same in German, Es regnet, it’s raining. Es schneit, it’s snowing. Old English was derived in large part from German.
lol
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