There is yet another way to mishandle verbs that you would do well to consider. Our smallest unmodifiable words are referred to more loosely as ‘particles’. When one of these, specifically a preposition or an adverb—off, in, out, etc.—is placed after a verb—say, to take—and the two-word result has a distinct meaning, you have what for a long time has been known as a ‘phrasal verb’. Nor need there be just one meaning for this unit. Using, as above, off, in, out, and to take, consider that to take off can mean both to ‘scarper’ and to ‘remove’; to take in, both to ‘shelter’ and to ‘delude’; to take out, both to ‘extract’ and to ‘vanquish by main force’—among many other possibilities. We shall not detain ourselves here with contested classes of, fine distinctions among, or indeed other names for the phrasal verb—though you should know that we most certainly could. This is because what is of interest to us here is how their meanings are so often idiomatic.
An ‘idiomatic’ meaning is, as the OED explains, one ‘not deducible from the meanings of the individual words’. Thus, in a manner non-deducible from its parts, to send up can mean to ‘mock’; to act out, to ‘have a tantrum’; to crack on, to ‘continue’; to fork out, to ‘pay’; to screw up, to ‘get wrong’; to rip off, to ‘swindle’. All the following meanings for to make out are idiomatic: to make out a cheque is to ‘write’ it; to make out a distant figure is to ‘discern’ it; to make out the meaning of a code is to ‘decipher’ it; to make out that you enjoyed a wearying party is to ‘pretend’ you did; to make out on a park bench is, at the very least, to ‘canoodle’ there, and so on. There are, in addition, lost meanings for to make out. When Addison, in a Spectator piece of 23 July 1711, despaired at those among his readers who expected too much of his ‘piece-meal’ efforts, he wrote, ‘it is often expected that every Sheet should be a kind of Treatise, and make out in Thought what it wants in Bulk’.
The guardians of Good English are particularly jealous of their grip on what they believe to be correct idiom. It is a sort of comfort to be in on a code, and this no doubt explains why they get shirty about the appearance of new interpretations of existing phrasal verbs, let alone about the appearance of entirely new phrasal verbs, dismissing them as slangy, and if possible (of course) as redundant. In Lost for Words, for example, John Humphrys roundly stigmatises ‘our habit of sprinkling prepositions where they should not be’, and asks, as a griper will, ‘why stressed “out” as opposed to simply stressed?’
The ‘redundantly’ sprinkled particle that attracts most ire from the gripers is not, however, out—or off or back or with, though The Economist Style Guide questions the point of ‘sell off’, ‘cut back’ and ‘meet with’, among others. It is up. True, an added up may occasionally invoke something literal. In the case of crop up, for instance, ‘up’ might be thought to convey the metaphorical force of a burgeoning wheat field, reversing the usual meaning of crop, which is more like ‘cut down’. Yet so compelling is the use of up in these formations that nowadays we feel cooped up, not, as we used to, cooped in; and we metaphorically slip up as though weightless in an orbiting space station, though use of slip up predates any human experience of zero gravity: in One Word and Another, 1954, V. H. Collins stolidly described the example of slip up as ‘a bad one, because one slips down’.
In the words of Bill Bryson, ‘up is often just a hitchhiker’. And where it is getting a free ride—as it is, he says, in head up—he rules that it should be ‘unceremoniously expunged’. Naturally, this anathematising is a lost battle in many, many cases. Take to think up, dream up and conjure up: though it is hard to put your finger on precisely what those ups are up to, who—even among the gripers—is so scrupulous with think, dream and conjure as never to use the easy-going add-on particle?**
An example of a newly interpreted phrasal verb using up, found in the lexicon of computer gamers, is to level up, meaning to ‘progress to the next stage of a game’ (‘he’s been grinding mooks all day, trying to level up’**). Neat as this is, it will almost certainly be written off as the displeasing slang of others by those who have no need to express the idea.** As for fess up, which docks the intensifier ‘con’ from the front of confess, and puts a different intensifier at the back end instead (‘fess’ derived from fateri, Latin for ‘utter’): grimly jocular, horrible and pointless, the gripers will declare. What might strike them as even worse than either, however, is the following snippet from a business dedicated to ‘remote outsourcing staff’, which explains—on the subject of ‘search-engine optimization’—that ‘It would take years before you fully understand up what SEO really is all about’ (perhaps it would). Equally bad must be the Mormon text, The Book of Helaman, 16:22, which states: ‘many more things did the people imagine up in their hearts’. The belief that up in these uses is no more than a feeble intensifier will be justified by pointing out that understand up means absolutely nothing more (to the person objecting) than understand, and imagine up, absolutely nothing more than imagine.
However, that initial presumed redundancy guarantees neither that a new phrasal form will fade away, nor that its meaning will remain hard to define. Indeed, a phrasal verb may well in time acquire all sorts of idiomatic nuance. In an over-hasty attempt to make his point, Mr Bryson classes the out in check out and the off in pay off as examples of ‘careless writing’, declaring that the particles supply no ‘special shade of meaning’ that the verbs check and pay would lose without them. But as even a careless English speaker could tell him, check out is often used to imply a pleasurable act of assessment (‘check out the dude in the corner’), where check would be comparatively dispassionate; and pay off tends to suggest an illicit transaction (‘he paid off the witness’), where pay, again, can be entirely neutral (‘the witness had her expenses paid’). Just as these two phrasal verbs have gained special senses over time—pay off meaning ‘bribe’ goes back to the 1940s—so, if imagine up has a future, there is no reliable way to predict just what it will be.
But none of this will matter to the gripers. If they see a particle as contributing no readily explainable new meaning to a verb, they will dismiss it as an iniquity—or a valueless ‘tail-twister’, in the words of A. P. Herbert in What a Word!—to be ‘unceremoniously expunged’. And if it does supply a new sense to a verb, they will nevertheless condemn the new use as falling outside the dictionary. Meanwhile, let us not forget that you can also offend them by failing to use a phrasal form to which they have accommodated themselves: in Right Word, Wrong Word, 1956, V. H. Collins declares sternly: ‘ring up (on the telephone) is not only permissible but compulsory, ring here without up being incorrect’. This stricture sounds risible now, and can only have been prompted then by numerous people failing to abide by it.
Phrasal verbs, as we have already noted, lend themselves to slang uses, or at the very least to informality, as in the examples dish out for ‘allot’, bugger off for ‘disappear’ (perhaps irresponsibly), duff up for ‘assault’, conk out for ‘expire’, knock up for ‘make pregnant’, and so on. Some of them also come across as childish, as when to tell on is used to mean ‘betray’: ‘I’m going to tell on you’. Dickens was certainly going for a colloquial touch in Pickwick Papers in 1837 when he had a character ask, ‘ “I say, old boy, where do you hang out?” ’ And when W. S. Gilbert used the same expression in a volume of his Bab Ballads from 1869, it was intended to add a comic note: ‘For thirty years this curious pair / Hung out in Canonbury Square’. But not only is it not axiomatic that a phrasal verb will seem slangy—to take on a challenge is perfectly formal, as is, linguistically, to hand over a ransom—it is not axiomatic either that it will seem less informal as it becomes more established, as one might vaguely suppose. To leave off, meaning to ‘stop’, is currently at the informal end of language use. Yet Addison, remembering with scorn those women who would receive visitors in the morning while still in bed, and undressed, wrote impeccably in The Spectator, 21 April 1711: ‘As the Coquets, who introduced this Custom, grew old, they left it off by Degrees’.
And, oddly perhaps, we can find ourselves missing those particles if they happen to get dropped again. When Dickens used hang out, it meant to live in a place. By the time W. S. Gilbert used it, it could also mean, as now, to idle somewhere. Many people find the idea of merely ‘hanging’, as it is often expressed these days—that is, hanging out without the out—yet more slangy than the phrasal form it replaces.** Meanwhile, millions who might once have said, ‘That’s that sorted out’, now say simply, ‘That’s that sorted’, and to a griper, the pithily reduced sort may well feel informal and ‘off’. The bare form pass, meaning ‘die’, may also sound awkward, or perhaps American, to those more used to using, or to hearing—if both forms of the expression are beneath them—to pass away or pass on. Chaucer’s Squire, however, cannot have sounded American to anyone (for obvious reasons) when he said, ‘Myn harm I wol confessen er I pace’.
Removing the particle from a phrasal verb is not the only way to duff it up a little. In the example to knock out, it is knock and not out that takes the verb endings: ‘The boxer knocked out his opponent’. But when this phrasal verb is abbreviated, becoming KO, it is treated as a compound, meaning that the verb endings move to the end of the whole unit: ‘The boxer KO’ed his opponent’. Presumably no one would be much worried by the form of either sentence. But what about this description of scientists ‘who succeeded in extending by factor 5.5 the life span of nematode Caenorhabditis elegans if two genes were knock-outed’?** In their unmediated (and even their mediated) reflections, freely broadcast to the world, some people seem to be that bit hastier than others to turn phrasal verbs into compound verbs: ‘I saw one of the live performances and she even knock-offed the choreography’; ‘The owner of the vehicle tip-offed the police and there was a chase’; ‘Jesus Christ himself was brought to trial using trump upped charges’.
John Steinbeck, in his Journal of a Novel, the entry for 13 February 1951, wrote: ‘one thing we have lost—the courage to make new words or combinations. Somewhere that old bravado has slipped off into a gangrened scholarship’. On the evidence of English phrasal verbs, how wrong he was! The recent examples to fess up, big up and sex up all now appear in the OED. To flag up, grass up and bin off ** have yet to make a showing. This patchy record is only to be expected. Popular phrasal verbs in English are so changeable, as the days, months and years go by, that an earnest dictionary and its lexicographers can hardly hope to keep up. Some time in the future, it is quite possible that they will hardly be able to hope up that they can keep up either. Once you have fully understood up how useful this chronic instability is for your campaign—whatever understanding up comes to mean—there should be nothing much to stop you. Go ahead, seize on some particles and sprinkle them about at will—but do also prepare yourself for the scorn the gripers will mete out in reply.