“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!