I haven't done this for awhile, but I'm raising a grammatical question. Caution, for those not interested in tearing apart a sentence, and getting some guilty pleasure joy - stop reading now.
First: what exactly does the up in phrasal verbs like look up mean? Some examples:
work up [a solution]
rustle up [some chow]
and also:
toughen up [those raw recruits]
bulk up
eat it up[, yum]
... and plenty more that I can't think of in this moment. It seems clear that there's a difference in what up means in the above examples.
Anyway, I found a couple of words recently that suggest that the up particle is still going strong in producing new phrase verbs.The first case is the ever greeting - what's up,
Good, eh? To what's as a transitive verb, and a new phrasal verb on top of that. How flexible is, the English! The up particle in the cases -work up, rustle up -add a connotation (or even denotation) in the new word Interestingly, sometimes the up particle is arbitrary (new, dim), other times not (work, rustle).
Ok, so that's one. Onward. I've also stumbled across another one. This was the line:
Many men have become female appeasers who need to, well, man up.
To man up = to become more masculine. This use of up is related to the second examples (toughen up, eat up, bulk up). These verbs are intransitive (can be). I'm not seeing that eat up belongs in the same category, unless the commonality is one of, what, completeness? To eat up means to finish eating something. Up is optional in toughen up; is it in to bulk up? Do they both suggest a kind of completeness, or a degree?
I confuse myself easily when I get deep into my grammatical brain. I could, of course, go look it up; I'm sure these are well-understood usages. My point, really, was just that I've seen a lot of usages of up , which I've now ... wait for it ... written up.
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