Mucking About With Phrasal Verbs

There's a wonderful thing called a phrasal verb. Essentially it's a verb plus a preposition, which together give you a whole new meaning: for example, doing up a house. A foreigner learning English might know the word do and the word up, but would still be unable to work out why you were performing a building skywards. And when he discovered that you could also do in your enemies, he would be done for.

Muck out = clean a stable
Muck in = help

Muck about = play uselessly

Muck up = ruin

So a lazy and incompetent stable boy could be said to muck about constantly, out and in rarely, and up everything.

Rhetorically, this trope of using one verb in several different senses (She left in a taxi and a flood of tears) is called syllepsis. Without doubt the greatest exercise is syllepsis is Have Some Madeira M'Dear by Flanders and Swann.

Printed lyrics here.

You are invited to compose similar sentences and leave them in the comments. However, before setting off to write a novel relying entirely on syllepsis you should consult Joel Stickley's inestimable How To Write Badly Well blog.

Lapidary and Telegraphic Texts

I was sending an encouraging text message today. I was going to write "Hope everything goes well." I never abbreviate. I typed hope, then my thumb hovered for a second over the 3def key, but everything is an awfully long word. In texting terms it's positively sequipedalian. Dammit, I thought, and typed all instead.

Texting is odd insofar as the slowness of typing provides not merely an incentive for orthographic economy but also the time in which to ponder it. A haiku (I despise haikus) gives the former but not the latter. Also haikus, unlike texts, are rarely written by people with anything to communicate except their own awfulness.

An inspirational haiku:

If you're too thick for

Iambic pentameters

Then don't write at all.

It is a maxim trite but tremendous that technology breeds style. The oral was replaced by the written which was replaced by the printed which was replaced by the telegraphed, which was replaced by the telephoned, which was replaced by the e-mail and the text.

The oral needed formulas to help the rhapsode's memory. The written produced the acrostic. The printed produced the cliché: a printers' term for a unchanged and reusable bit of type. Etc etc etc.

Once upon a time a frugal use of words was called a "telegraphic style" because a telegram's cost would increase for every word after the first ten. We texters share with them the omission of I, the and a and a ruthless attitude towards redundant phrasal verbs like "phone up". However, ten words for nothing is positively Edenic to the modern texter. Remember that I was just trying to cut down on letters.

For true companionship we must go back to the stonemason. Whilst carefully chiselling out each line of each letter economies of phraseology would be as tempting as siren with a feather bed. I would be preferred to M, and L to Q. A stonemason would have laughed at the my petty pruning of everything to all and pointed out that "prospers" would have been one key-stroke the fewer. And from such carvers, or lapidarii as they were called in Latin, we derive the phrase a lapidary style.

Unfortunately textual, as an adjective, is spoken for. So I don't know that my digital indolence will ever get the epithet that it deserves and requires

Tiring

.

Ratcheting Up the Pressure

Pressure, as everbody who reads the newspapers knows, is either mounting or growing, especially on ministers (government not religious). I have searched but can find no mention anywhere in the British press of pressure descending or dwindling. Indeed, I imagine the cabinet room to be rather like the Mariana Trench and its ministers to resemble the angler fish and flounders that haunt those remote and inhospitable depths. Geoff Hoon, I am reliably informed, is able to withstand pressures of up to 15,700 pounds per square inch, which would crush a normal human in an instant. It's something to do with being from Nottingham.

The mechanism by which pressure mounts is almost always a thing called a ratchet, which is used as part of the phrasal verb "to rachet up". This strange process has been reported 620 times in the last week alone. Neither Barack Obama nor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad nor Rafael Benitez seems ever to leave home without his trusty ratchet. A ratchet is of course "A mechanism consisting of a pawl that engages the sloping teeth of a wheel or bar, permitting motion in one direction only." It looks like this (the pawl is the bit at the top):

The wheel can only turn anticlockwise. This device is the reason that pressure only ever mounts and grows: the pawl is stopping it from declining. This is bad news for Geoff Hoon. It's odd that journalists' imaginations should always leap to this reasonably obscure mechanism, I assume that they're all terribly keen on DIY. Many other things can be ratcheted up including sanctions, salaries and capital buffers (the people who polish London).

A capital buffer working on Nelson's Column

Speaking Out

I was distressed to read this in The Times today:

CHIEF SCIENTIST SPEAKS OUT TO SUPPORT SACKED ADVISER'S STANCE ON CANNABIS

It wasn't anything to do with drugs that worried me.  It was that the headline made me realise that in all my long and fruitless life I don't think that I have ever spoken out.  Not once.  I'm not even sure what speaking out is or how it would differ from simply speaking.  I've spoken up more times than I can remember. Indeed I've spoken up, of, about, over (other people), in (tongues and bad French), down (to everybody), under (my breath and caution), from (experience), on, to, and even - I think - at; but never out.

This is, I realise, a failing in me and I'm going to do my best to rectify it.  I may be in the gutter, but I'm dreaming of a bigger, better gutter.

1,195 people speak, spoke or have spoken out in British news in the last week although a fair proportion of these outspeakers seem to be one young lady with the implausible name of Rihanna.

Well, folks, I'm going to change, starting today.  I'm going to start speaking out.  As of now I promise to become a lot less like me and a lot more like Rihanna.

I feel particularly guilty about the whole speaking-out thing because as a child my favourite poem was Horatius by Lord Macaulay about the dauntless three defending the bridge over the Tiber.  I used to sit on my father's knee and he would read it to me.

Then out spake Spurius Lartius; a Ramnian proud was he:
"Lo, I will stand at thy right hand and keep the bridge with thee."
And out spake strong Herminius; of Titian blood was he:
"I will abide on thy left side, and keep the bridge with thee."

Yet out I have never spake. Were those happy days of my infancy wasted?  I think we both know the answer is yes. 

I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." 

Then Rihanna and I will go and defend bridges.  Rihanna ought to be good at that. She's even proficient with ancient weaponry, apparently she FELT LIKE SPEARS AFTER ATTACK.

When I finally got over the Times headline and read down to the first sentence of the article I discovered that "divisions" had "deepened", and at that point I despaired.

Rihanna and me at work