“We beat them up, didn’t we!”

“We beat them up, didn’t we!”

A few days ago a group of us decided to visit a mediaeval castle on a high and very steep hill overlooking a lake.  As we walked, we got slower and slower as most of our group are only of average fitness, and two children were with us. So we made real efforts to keep up a good steady pace, and to breathe deeply to get plenty of oxygen into our lungs as we climbed the old path.

Our efforts paid off — we got to the castle well before a large number of other tourists, so we were first in line at the little terrace-café to get our cappuccinos (yes I know it should really be ‘cappuccini’ – especially in Italy where we were, but in English the ‘S’ plural is what we use *). Five minutes or so later we saw a dozen or more people arrive and form a long hot queue for their iced coffees, fizzy drinks and snacks.

The children were pleased they’d got to the café first and were already sitting with their ‘prizes’: excellent hand-made Italian ice-creams. My friend, smiling broadly and proudly, remarked to her children, “Yes! We beat them up, didn’t we!” The children nodded vigorously and carried on with their ice-creams, happy knowing that they — not the other tourists — were the ‘winners’ to the top of the hill.

“We beat them up!” This struck me as one of those English ambiguities entirely dependent on context. 

To ‘beat someone up’ means to attack and violently assault someone. What?!?!

My gentle, kind and motherly friend certainly didn’t mean that we had attacked and beaten the other people, but simply that we had ‘won’ the ‘competition’ to get to the top of the hill, and to the café first.

Yes… to ‘beat someone’ means to hit someone repeatedly.  But ‘beat someone’ also means to compete against them in competition, and to win. 

But what about the ‘up’? Doesn’t adding this preposition change the meaning? Doesn’t it become ‘attack’ when we say, “We beat them up”?  No, it doesn’t — well maybe a dictionary might says this is what it means, but the dictionary definition is, as is so often the case, only part of the story. A dictionary would tell you that to ‘beat someone up’ is a transitive phrasal verb, separable, where the object (‘someone’) goes between the verb and the particle ‘up’.

So why in this case did my friend say, “We beat them up”?  And why did we all smile and agree, and feel very pleased with ourselves? Well, as native English speakers we all immediately knew she meant “We beat them up to the top of the hill”: we all knew instantly that she meant we had ‘won the Hill-Top-Arrival-First Competition’, even though none of us had said we were having any kind of competition at all. It was simply all contextual, and of that specific moment.  As native speakers, we all implicitly knew that in this case ‘up’ was acting as an adverb, or adverbial preposition, and it meant movement ‘up the hill’.

It’s interesting how so much of meaning, in every language, is in the context.

Words are the vital oil of the wheels of communication, but this example shows how context is the vehicle.

Our walk up the hill and our rapid descent later, reminds me of the traditional old song:

“Oh the grand old Duke of York, he had ten thousand men,

And he marched them up to the top of the hill,

And he marched them down again!

And when they were up, they were up.

And when they were down, they were down.

And when they were only half-way up, they were neither up nor down!”

Some other examples of phrasal verbs which could be confused with adverbials, or with so-called ‘prepositional verbs’.

1. run up

- run up a bill, with the meaning to accumulate i.e. the bill gets larger, and you have, finally, to pay more  [a transitive, separable phrasal verb]

- run up a hill is a prepositional phrase, i.e. the ‘up’ has its true meaning of denoting movement to a higher place. Compare run down the hill, run along the road.

2. come across

- “I bought these lovely earrings in Greece – I came across them in a little shop in Antiparos” = I found them.   [Here ‘come across’ is a transitive, but inseparable phrasal verb].

- “From Paros, he came across on a ferry to the small island where we were staying.”  Here in ‘come across’ the word ‘across’ functions as an adverb, with ‘across’ denoting movement over the water between the two islands. There’s no object, and examples like these are sometimes known (especially in English language teaching textbooks) as ‘prepositional verbs’. In having no objects, they also are not transitive.

Finally, a note on the song above: march [somebody] up

- The grand old Duke of York marched them up to the top of the hill. Here ‘up’ functions as an adverb, with ‘up’ denoting movement upwards, higher.  The old Duke’s soldiers, his ‘men’ are the objects of the verb ‘march’ and here it means the Duke ordered the men to march: it’s a transitive verb, an unusual use of to ‘march’.

I wonder if the Duke beat the soldiers up, or if the soldiers beat him up?

For further reading on adverbials, see David Crystal Making Sense of Grammar.

* With thanks to Purple for Italian language advice!

Tagged!

Tagged! I’ve really been noticing this word recently… and have been watching the evolving use of both the base word ‘tag’ and ‘tagged’.

Only a few years ago, 'tag' used to be a word almost no non-native speakers of English tended to even recognise, let alone actively use. Now you can hardly even turn on the TV or radio without hearing it, and can’t look at social media or many websites without coming across it. It’s getting to be almost ubiquitous — tagging is everywhere!

­— hash-tag …     

— You’ve been tagged in xxx’s photo…

Yet strangely, when I search Google for this — ‘tagged definition’ was my search today at https://www.google.gr/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=tagged+definition&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=O-O9V47hL8jb8AfTsJnYCg —  Google’s definition of ‘tag’ and of ‘tagged’ still doesn’t include any reference to online social media (today is 24.08.2016), although ‘hashtag’ is there when I search for it separately.

The Urban Dictionary gives a truly urban, though still not high-tech or digital, use for ‘tag’:

Top Definition:

Tag; a personal signature, usually vandalism with spraypaint, but can be any graffiti.

www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tag

Wikipedia gives a good long list of many of the current uses of the word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag, and I must say I was surprised when I saw how many there are!  A large number of them are in Computing. This is perhaps not surprising as new technology is one of the main areas to generate word-use change — I remember when a mouse was only a little animal for instance… :)

We have tags in our clothes; we tag criminals instead of putting them in prison; we tag along with someone when we’re not really invited to be with them, or we’re not really part of the group; kids play tag in the playground; and on and on… — masses of meanings and uses of this little word!

The origin of the word ‘tag’

tag (n.1) "small, hanging piece from a garment," c. 1400, of uncertain origin but probably from a Scandinavian source (compare Norwegian tagg "point, prong, barb," Swedish tagg "prickle, thorn") and related to Middle Low German tagge "branch, twig, spike"), from Proto-Germanic *tag-. The sense development might be "point of metal at the end of a cord, string, etc.," hence "part hanging loose." Or perhaps ultimately from PIE *dek-, a root forming words referring to fringe, horsetail, locks of hair" (see with tail (n.1)).

"to furnish with a tag," late 14c. (implied in tagged), from tag (n.1). Meaning "go along as a follower" is from 1670s; sense of "follow closely and persistently" is from 1884. Related: Tagging. Verbal phrase tag along is first recorded 1900.

tag (v.2)   "a touch in the game of tag," 1878; in baseball, 1904, from tag (n.2); the adjective in the pro-wrestling sense is recorded from 1955. Related: Tagged; tagging.

tag (n.2)   "children's game," 1738 (in reference to "Queen Mary's reign"), perhaps a variation of Scottish tig "touch, tap" (1721), probably an alteration of Middle English tek "touch, tap" (see tick (n.2)). Baseball sense is from 1912.

Meaning "a label" is first recorded 1835; sense of "automobile licence-plate" is recorded from 1935, originally underworld slang. Meaning "an epithet, popular designation" is recorded from 1961, hence slang verb meaning "write graffiti in public places" (1990).

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=tag  (Accessed 24.08.2016)

‘Boys’ and ‘Girls’ at the Rio Olympics?

For a long time, I've found the use of ‘girl’ and ‘boy’ to refer to adults as pretty irritating and belittling – not when used in a group of friends, say, in relaxed and informal circumstances like in a pub, but by official commentators, teachers, journalists and so on. Here in the UK, I’m always annoyed when I see official signs in, for example Female Toilets at an adult college, addressing the students of the college, and presumably all female staff of all ages, as ‘GIRLS’.  I’ve always noticed how it seems much more unusual to describe adult males as ‘boys’ than it is to talk about women as ‘girls’.

So today on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07m4d53 I was interested to hear how an interviewee, Sarah Grieves, Language Research Project Manager at Cambridge University Press, was reflecting, amongst other things, on the use of ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ to refer to male and female sportspeople. She draws on 20 years of studying the English language to highlight the disparities in how we talk about men and women in relation to sport. Today the Rio de Janeiro Olympics opens, and (English) language researchers are going to be listening carefully to how commentators describe the competitors.

There is apparently more likelihood that female sportspeople are referred to as ‘girls’ rather than as ‘women’, compared to 'boys' being used to refer to 'men', and what’s more, women sportspeople are disproportionately described in terms of their clothing, their marital status, and so on; and if they have children, as ‘mothers’, compared to their male counterparts with offspring who are more rarely referred to as ‘fathers’ by sports commentators.  Also words like ‘strong’ tend to be used more for males than for women – so men’s physical prowess on the sports field rather than their social status and clothing is focussed on.

Yet sometimes sports commentators also refer to men as ‘boys’. The word ‘boy', when used to describe adult male humans, is either friendly or 'matey' and suitable therefore for informal contexts. If used in more formal contexts, it rarely indicates much respect, but instead suggests a kind of infantilisation—in other words, a kind of belittling, an implicit suggestion that the person is not quite adult, not really fully mature, not quite fully responsible. At best it is informal and friendly, but is this appropriate when describing professionals in their professional context? If you look up ‘boy’ in a dictionary you see something like this, from Google:

1. a male child or youth.

"a four-year-old boy"

"as a boy he had been fascinated by architecture"

Google gives the following first, main, definition for ‘girl':

1. a female child.

"girls go through puberty earlier than boys"

(Then there are various other definitions - see below where I've listed many of them.)

But when it comes to the various definitions and usages of the word ‘girl’ I was especially struck by this one at Collins Dictionary: “Usage note. The use of girl as in meaning 4, to refer to a woman of any age, is highly likely to be considered old-fashioned or to cause offence.” (my bold underlining) 

4. informal a woman of any age

http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/girl

And here is the meaning 4 at dictionary.com:

4. Informal: Sometimes Offensive. a grown woman, especially when referred to familiarly:

She's having the girls over for bridge next week.”

…with their Usage Note:

Usage note

Some adult women are offended if referred to as a girl, or informally, a gal. However, a group of adult female friends often refer to themselves as the girls, and their “girls night out” implies the company of adult females. Also, a woman may express camaraderie by addressing another woman as girl, as in You go, girl! or Attagirl!

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/girl?s=t

The Cambridge Dictionary online, as part of its definition, gives this information:

[old-fashioned]

a woman worker, especially when seen as one of a group:

shop/office girls

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/girl

So it’s pretty clear that the use of ‘girls’ to describe adult women, in formal, professional contexts, such as that of competing in the Olympics, is either not fully respectful of women’s formal profession, status, age and maturity, or it is at best old-fashioned, or even at worst downright offensive.  Also, the commentators are not the ‘friends’ of the women they are describing, so shouldn’t be taking these liberties to describe the women as ‘girls’.

I’d like to hear ‘girl’ used much less to talk about responsible adult women – who should not be infantilised by being called merely ‘girls’, as Sarah Grieves the language professional at Cambridge University Press pointed out today on the BBC.

I’d also be interested to hear what you think too, about the use of ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ to describe adult women and men in the mainstream and other media.

Further definitions of BOY and GIRL:

BOY:  Secondary definitions, again by Google:

2. a person's son.

"she put her little boy to bed"

3. a male child or young man who does a specified job.

"a delivery boy"

4. a man, especially a young or relatively young one.

"I was the new boy at the office"

5. informal

men who mix socially or who belong to a particular group, team, or profession.

"he wants to stay one of the boys"

6. dated

a friendly form of address from one man to another, especially from an older man to a young man.

"my dear boy, don't say another word!"

7. dated offensive

(often used as a form of address) a black male servant or worker.

8. a form of address to a male dog.

"down boy!"

GIRL:  Secondary definitions, again by Google:

2. a person's daughter.  “he was devoted to his little girl”, with the synonym ‘female child’.

3. a young or relatively young woman.

"I haven't got the time to meet girls"

4. a young woman of a specified kind or having a specified job.

"a career girl"

5. informal

women who mix socially.

"I look forward to having a night with the girls"

6. a person's girlfriend.

"his girl eloped with an accountant"

7. dated

a female servant.