Lets Get UP & Running

What's up with ‘UP’!

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 [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].

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 call up our friends and we use up the opportunity to brighten up our home, after the party is up we warm up the leftovers and clean up the kitchen. We were once locked up in the house, it was Pooja who had messed up and forgotten the keys at her’s cousin’s place uptown. Some guy who’d come to fix up the old car, rescued us from the holdup.

At other times the little word has a real special meaning. People stir up trouble, line up for tickets, work up an appetite, think up excuses, make up for a loss, ….

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. We seem 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 is clouding 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 awhile, 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!

Happy Reading…Lets get up and running, speed up the process of learning!