Oz & Up

Last night I had a linguistic dream in which I was explaining to an old friend how difficult English is for foreign-born people to learn. Just so many anomalies, so many idioms. We like to force words into new meanings that don’t always make much sense. I told him about the first line of the song in The Wizard of Oz, “We’re off to see the wizard.” Odd word, off. “To be off” suggests an actual movement toward something. I can just see Dorothy, the Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow skipping through the Oz countryside, the Emerald City in the distance (Oh, and don’t forget Toto). So they’re off to off the wizard. That is, they’re going there to kill the wizard. They aren’t really, but in my proposed sentence above, there’s that second off to explain, the verb to off, which in slang means to kill. The first off simply means that they’re about to begin a journey. Reverse it and you might get, “We’re on to you” (We know all your secrets). Or “We’re onto you” (We’re now sitting on you). And look at going in “We’re going to be going to the Emerald City.” The first going has nothing to do with a physical move forward as in the second going. It means future time, as in “Sometime in the future we’re moving toward the Emerald City.” By this time in my dream, my friend was just shaking his head, moving slowly to the bedroom door.

More linguistic oddities, even though not in my dreams, just in my observations. We love to take adverbs and force them into joining forces with some verb to take on new meanings. Our little two-letter word up is a good example of these strange verbal unions: give up (surrender), suck up (either to renew fortitude or to falsely flatter), take up (begin a new hobby), sign up (join), seize up (piston freezing by friction), shut up (close one’s mouth), chin up (raise one’s chin [a verb], but chin-up [a noun in which one raises one’s body by pulling oneself up to a bar]), shine up (falsely flatter), fix up (repair), show up (appear), slow up (And why does “slow up” mean exactly the same as “slow down?”), stick up (a verb suggesting the act of putting a gun in someone’s face) and stickup (a noun indicating the act of putting a gun in someone’s face), stuck up (nose in the air), and throw up (Do we regurgitate up or down?). You know, all this linguistic consideration is giving me a bellyache. I think I’ll just throw up my hands. Eeeooo, now there’s a disgusting image.