The caprice of phrasal verbs (formerly called verb-adverb combinations) came to my conscious attention sometime in the 1950s, when I first read Mansfield Park. Fanny Price, the heroine, is lying on a couch; her sailor brother William cries, "Poor Fanny!... how soon she is knocked up! Why, the sport is but just begun. I hope we shall keep it up these two hours." I was shocked. In the P. S. 217 schoolyard where I learned my English, "knocked up" had one and only one definition: made pregnant. There could be no doubt-- especially when the meaning of knocked up was confirmed by such transparent sexual equivocations as "sport," and "keep it up these two hours." When did proper Fanny Price find time to get herself knocked up and how could I have been so inattentive a reader as not to notice? And where did Jane Austen learn schoolyard slang?
How in the world was I to know that in nineteenth-century England, "knocked up" was an innocent phrasal verb that meant "tired."
Phrasal verbs are treacherous. There's nothing in the basic definitions of either "knock" or "up" that yields tired (or pregnant either, for that matter).
I was equally confused when Othello, quelling a disturbance, commanded the contending parties to "Put up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them." Inasmuch as I wasn't familiar with the phrasal verb, "put up," which means "sheathe," I guessed that "put up" meant its exact opposite -- "brandish." "Put up" is misleading: what's "up" about sheathe?
Just as there is nothing "up" about "up", there is nothing "out" about the "out" in "put out." The meaning that I knew was the demotic one to which my dictionary provides the formal "to indulge in promiscuous sexual intercourse." A woman who puts out can get herself knocked up. But "put out" has other equally unpredictable meanings: "make an effort," for one, and "annoyed" ("I was put out by his use of verbs") for another. Moreover, a person who's put out, can also be "put off," or dissuaded; "put on," or deceived; "put up," or lodged; "put up with," or tolerated; "put down," or harshly criticized. A person can be persuasive and "put across" a point, or be insane and be "put away" in an institution, or can be frugal and "put by" money for a rainy day; or can be gullible and "put upon." Phrasal verbs are exceedingly nasty little critters, and they must drive English language learners off their collective gourds.
Next week; same time, same station: got .*.
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