Re: Have Tou Ever Thought About the Word "UP"

On Dec 20, 7:48 pm, "mul" <eco...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Lovers of the English language might enjoy this. It is yet another example
of why people learning English have trouble with the language.....There is a
two-letter word in English that perhaps has more meanings than any other
two-letter word, and that word is 'UP.'  It is listed in the dictionary as
being used as an [adverb], [preposition], [adjective], [noun] or
[verb].....It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top
of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?..At a
meeting, why does a topic come UP ? Why do we speak UP, and why are the
officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a
report? We cal UP our friends and we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP
the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP
the house and some guys fill UP the old car...At other times the little word
has a real special meaning. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets,
work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.,,To be dressed is one thing but
to be dressed UP is special.,,And this up is confusing:..A drain must be
opened UP because it is stopped  UP.,,We open UP a store in the morning but
we close it UP at night.   Weseem to be pretty mixed UP about UP !,,To be
knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP , look the word UP in the
dictionary.In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes  UP almost 1/4 of the page
and can add  UP to about thirty definitions,,If you are UP to it, you might
try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of
your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or
more.,,When it threatens to rain, we say it isclouding UP . When the sun
comes out we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it wets UP the earth.
When it does not rain for a while, things dry UP.,,One could go on & on, but
I'll wrap it UP , for now  ........my time is UP , so time to shut
UP!,,Oh...one more thing,,,What is the first thing you do in the morning &
the last thing you do at night?,,U    P,,Don't screw up. Send this on to
everyone you look up in your address book.,,,Now I'll shut up

A lady lecturing recently on the Irish language drew attention to the
fact
(I mentioned it myself as long ago as 1925) that, while the average
English speaker gets along with a mere 400 words, the Irish-speaking
peasant uses 4000. Considering what most English speakers can achieve
with their tiny fund of noises, it is a nice speculation to what
extremity one would be reduced if one were locked up for a day with an
Irish-speaking bore and bereft of all means of committing murder or
suicide.

My point, however, is this. The 400/4000 ratio is fallacious;
400/400,000 would be more like it. there is scarcely a single word in
the Irish (barring, possibly, Sasanach) that is simple and explicit.
Apart from words with endless shades of cognate meaning, there are
many with so complete a spectrum of graduated ambiguity that each of
them can be made to express two directly contrary meanings, as well as
a plethora of intermediate concepts that have no bearing on either.
And all this strictly within the linguistic field. Superimpose on all
that the miasma of ironic usage, poetic licence, oxymoron, plamás,
Celtic evasion, Irish bullery and Paddy Whackery, and it a safe bet
that you will find yourself very far from home. Here is an example
copied from Dinneen and from more authentic sources known only to my
little self:

cur, g. curtha and cuirthe, m. - act of putting, sending, sowing,
raining, discussing, burying, vomiting, hammering into the ground,
throwing through the air, rejecting, shooting, the setting or clamp in
a rick of turf, selling, addressing, the crown of cast-iron buttons
which have been made bright by contact with cliff-faces, the stench of
congealing badger's suet, the luminance of glue-lice, a noise made in
an empty house by an unauthorised person, a heron's boil, a
leprechaun's denture, a sheep-biscuit, the act of inflating hare's
offal with a bicycle pump, a leak in a spirit level, the whine of
sewage farm windmill, a corncrake's clapper, the scum on the eye of a
senile ram, a dustman's dumpling, a beetle's ***, the act of
loading every rift with ore, a dumb man's curse, a blasket, a 'kur', a
fiddler's occupational disease, a fairy godmother's father, the art of
predicting past events, a wooden coat, a custard mincer, a blue-
bottle's `farm', a gravy flask, a timber-mine, a toy craw, a porridge-
mill, a fair-day donnybrook with nothing barred, a stoat's stomach
pump, a broken -

But what is the use? One could go on and on without reaching anywhere
in particular.

Your paltry English speaker apprehends sea-going craft through the
infantile cognition which merely distinguishes the small from the big.
If it's small, it's a boat, and if it's big it's a ship. In his great
book An tOileanach the uneducated Tomás Ó Criomhthain uses perhaps a
dozen words to convey the concept of varying super-marinity - árthrach
long, soitheach, bád, naomhóg, bád raice, galbhád, púcán and whatever
you are having yourself.

The plight of the English speaker with his wretched box of 400 vocal
beads may be imagined when I say that a really good Irish speaker
would blurt out the whole 400 in one cosmic grunt. In Donegal there
are native speakers who know so many words that it is a matter of
pride to them to never use the same word twice in a life-time. Their
life (not to say their language) becomes very complex at the century
mark; but there you are.


© Myles na gCopaleen c. 1945.
.

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