Phrasal Verbs are Low-Class

What is a word? Normally, it's easy to tell because we separate them by spaces. There were eleven words in my last sentence. But we also have the idea that if something is a word, you should be able to look up what it means in a dictionary. So what about "to look up"? It's one unit of meaning: here "up" doesn't indicate the direction opposite to down; it is a preposition you add which changes the meaning of the verb. You have to look at the phrase as a whole. "To look up" is a phrasal verb.

Phrasal verbs get pretty tricky in English because they often have multiple meanings. For example, "to hold up" means either "to delay" or "to rob." (Jokes follow easily: "Sorry I didn't call you back until now. David held me up." "I didn't know he had a gun.")

I've compiled a list of all the phrasal verbs I can think of that come from "to put." I lifted two or three from here, but my list is more complete. Check it out:

put
	aside	to save: "Ever since they got married, they put aside half their income every paycheck and now they're millionaires."
	at	to estimate: "I put the painting's value at about six dollars."
	away	to incarcerate: "After he murdered that girl a few years ago, he was put away for life."
		to tidy: "Put away all your toys once James leaves."
	back	to delay: "If the construction guys don't finish today, it'll put us back a whole week."
		to spend: "Filling up my tank put me back over a hundred dollars."
		to return: "When you're done borrowing my computer, could you put it back where it was before?"
	back together	to repair: "Dad's going to be home in five minutes and I don't know how to put the TV back together."
	behind	to forgive: "Even though you ate my last Oreo, I'm willing to put it behind us."
	down	to criticize: "Why do you put me down all the time?"
		to commit: "Put me down for a batch of cookies."
	forward	to suggest: "I put forward the idea that we should market to the elderly, but it didn't go over well."
	in	to submit: "I put in for reinstatement yesterday."
		to expend: "But I've already put in fifty hours of community service!"
	off	to tarry: "I've put off doing the dishes for so long they're starting to grow moldy."
		to be offended: "I was really put off by his comment about my weight."
	on	to deceive: "Front row tickets to Anberlin? Are you putting me on?"
		to blame: "You're the one who said we should try the gallon challenge. If you feel sick, don't put that on me."
		to perform: "Tomorrow I'll be putting on a magic show in my living room."
		to organize: "Madame Fleury is the one putting on the event, so ask her if you can bring guests.
	out	to extinguish: "Put out the fire now!"
		to give sexual favors: "I like going on dates with her because I know she'll put out."
	through	to connect: "Please put me through to the principal."
		to pass: "He was failing, but I put him through to the fifth grade anyway."
		to make suffer: "We're breaking up because I couldn't put her through a long distance relationship."
	together	to assemble: "I put together this report like you asked me to, Sir."
	toward	to contribute: "We each put $75 a week from our jobs toward a nice car."
	up	to score: "In the basketball game last night, Wilkins put up seventeen points."
		to house: "Maybe Jenny could put you up for the night."
		to post: "I put up fliers, but no one's found Fluffy!"
	up to	to convince: "Did your brother put you up to this? I can't imagine you'd steal on your own."
	up with	to endure: "I put up with your shenanigans every day."

That's 32 meanings of "put + preposition." I even left out uses in which the preposition is used as a preposition, like putting clothes on. But notice that these meanings are defined differently than usual: they are exact synonyms. Substitute any phrasal verb with my definition and there's no denotative difference. (The only exception is "to put back" which I glossed as "to spend," but compare "I spent ten dollars on a meal" and "Buying the meal put me back ten dollars.")

Since phrasal verbs have exact synonyms you never need to use them. In contrast, most words have a niche. I use the word "hover" because I don't want to say "to hang fluttering in the air or on the wing" every time I want to talk about a helicopter. But in America culture, where there is similitude, there is ordering. "Big" and "enormous" mean the same thing, but "enormous" is considered a more educated word. Each phrasal verb is exactly equivalent to another verb, but since the phrasal verb is simpler, it is considered casual, informal, and lower-class. Just think about it. Presidential candidates these days try to relate to the average Joe--explicitly--so think of their aides instead. Can you imagine a McCain aide letting out a press release to say Senator McCain was "put up to" selecting Palin as his running mate? Of course not. Phrasal verbs aren't dignified.

I phrase my verbs sometimes to give this blog a conversational tenor, so don't think it's me being picky. I'm just suggesting that parents teach their kids how to use silverware and how not to use phrasal verbs so when they're on a date with the President's daughter they won't be embarrassed.

Football Dominates

I haven't ever tried to write sports commentary, but it's hard to blog and not comment on sports when that's all you do in a day. I mean, I played racquetball early this morning, but that doesn't count because anything you do on a Saturday before noon is bonus activity. I ended up stopping by Andrew's dorm at 2 and he said he had just woken up.

After my morning extra credit awake time, I picked up my Chinese friend Yang from his apartment to introduce him to the aspect of American college culture called "tailgating." First I had to explain what tailgating was as he carefully documented the experience with his camera.

"Those people in purple and yellow are LSU fans," I said, pointing out some already-toasted Louisiana State supporters. "I hope we beat them."

"Me too," Yang said. "Is it okay if I take picture them?"

"You want to take a picture of them? Sure, go ahead."

He leaned out the window like the foreigner I used to be when I was in China and snapped a shot before we drove away. I introduced him to so many Americans when we got to the RUF tailgate that he gave up on any hope of remembering people's names and loosened up a bit talking about himself. We also worked out a system where I would introduce him to someone. When the person said his/her name, I would repeat it in really clear English so he would hear it better. I started doing that after one guy's name was Chuck, which Yang thought sounded identical to the word "truck." (They don't have the "tr" sound in Chinese.)

Yang and I tailgated for a while, and then when he left I stopped by the Cru tailgate and hung out with more people. Then tonight was the game we had been getting all pepped up for.

I can't decide whether I like the Associated Press summary of it or the concise, straight-up version from ESPN. Regardless, UF played an amazing game. This was an important game, since we've already lost once this season and if we had lost again tonight our season would've been over. On the other hand, LSU was ranked #3 so winning would seriously boost our pitiful 11th place. And then we won, and won by enough that Tim Tebow could sit out our last few offensive plays and let the second-string quarterback try to bring the ball in for a touchdown.

Understanding football strategy is a large part of your football experience. People who know things about football can get outraged at a ref far better than we normal fans. For them, when the ref blows the whistle for a penalty, they already know what the ref is going to call and are shouting about how it can't be true because we saw it and because we're UF and UF doesn't deserve penalties because we're awesome.

Sometimes their rhetoric gets a little shaky, but that's why we have a band who drowns them out with honor and distracts everyone until the next play with our cheers.

It's taken me several years of coming to UF games to let my mood be influenced by a football game. Now, though, if we lose I feel like I've lost, and when we won tonight I felt like I deserved to go to sleep because we had just done a great job.

Great job, Will. Now let's get some sleep.

The Gay Guy and the Fat Girl

Today's theme is contentious, so I start with an anecdote.

I had dinner with April tonight and she asked how I was doing. "Pretty good," I said. "I late-added a Chinese class, then dropped that and another class to be able to adjust back to America better."

"I know," she said. "I read your blog."

It's tricky, this blogging thing, trying to be interesting but not so much that I'm boring in real life. I have to think deeper for people who read my blog. Just wait till you get a fake name from me, April.

Take, for example, my friend I'll call Ron. I imagine he'd be shy about hearing his real name because he this is a story about rejection, and he isn't used to it. I, on the other hand, am rejection's right hand man. Fresh off rejection, it always helps to go back to the basics, so Ron and I have been theorizing about how relationships develop. Or don't develop.

It sucks to realize that the girl you're interested in doesn't even have you on her radar. Ron and I have decided to call this being the gay guy: a different kind of male to girls. One who can be confided in, one who is nonthreatening, unarousing, removed. It's like a girl clapping for Pinocchio's performance and then laughingly skipping away with a brawny man while Pinocchio is left protesting with wooden lips, "But I'm a real boy!"

Don't take me to mean that I expect girls to flirt with every straight guy they know. I just mean that it's nice to be on a list even if you don't want to be selected. For example, consider this dialogue:

"I'm so mad at Francine."

"What for?"

"She didn't invite me to her party."

"Sharon, you're out of town that weekend."

"Yeah, but she still should have invited me."

Ron and I phrased it differently, but with the same message: each country must have some kind of a list of how much any other country is a threat. Would a country want to be a threat? Of course not, but you at least want to be considered. And even if you've had a summit at which you decide that you're not a huge threat, and are just going to be friends, at least you earned a meeting. Guys don't want to be human Switzerlands.

Then Ron and I realized that guys do it, too, stereotypically to the fat girl: you just expect her to know that she's out of the running and treat her like a bystander in the great race for a spouse. She's less than a girl.

I remember in junior high there was a girl I liked who was way too cool for me. She liked one of my friends, and I would ask her to tell me about it because I'd rather hear her talk about liking someone and pretend it was me than not hear about it and puff myself up to thinking I was under consideration.

I'm not sure if I chose the best path. Currently dispassionate me would say neither approach was good and I should've just gotten over her. But if you could just get over someone, you wouldn't need to invent explanations like Ron and I have for why it hurts.

This is Why We Shun

Recently I used the word "shun" and the guy I said it to used it the next day in an unrelated context. I think "shun" has a very high niche factor, a term I just made up to describe when a word could be used more than it is and when you hear it, you feel like using it more. For example, I'm taking a class on James Joyce, and his ginormous vocabulary expands mine: I could use the word "sordid" more. I think I used it on a test Friday; I'm tempted to use it practically every day. Sordid has a high niche factor.

I remember the first time I heard someone say "shun the nonbeliever" as an aside to me disagreeing with something, and to have his friends hiss back, "shunnn." I hadn't seen Charlie the Unicorn. (The relevant part happens a third of the way through for old geezers who can't stand to watch the whole thing. You'll see what I mean.) I thought the phrase was weird and "shun" was a harsh reaction to my position. But once I caught up with the culture, I realized they were actually being friendlier than I thought by lightening the conflict with an allusion to something I should have seen. And people think allusions are only for ancient Greek mythology.

Here's a huge example of how pop culture divides geezers (and much younger) from geezers-to-be: http://www.snorgtees.com/ This website sells t-shirts for pop culture (I counted thirty three shirts inspired by media). The beauty of the digital age is that really small markets measured proportionally are large enough measured straight-on for business. Only a thousand people in the country might buy a shirt (which is less than a tenth of one percent of America's population), but it's enough for them to make a profit. Take, for instance, the blue shirt almost halfway down:


I like this shirt because, if you're under 25, I'd say, you agree that it's hilarious. The top part comes from a level in the earliest Super Mario Brothers games (early 90s), which you know because the flower is really pixelated (video game graphics weren't good back then). The flower gives your character the ability to shoot fireballs at enemies. Obviously, your video game character having firepower doesn't make his temperature increase--video game characters don't have temperature! But when you think about firepower, you have to have some heat to make that work. It's funny to apply such rigorous scientific logic to a game, like trying to explain why a dog or shoe can buy property in Monopoly.

But that's only half the joke. The caption says "this is why i'm hot." (Geezers-to-be shun capitalization in informal use.) It isn't enough to know about Super Mario Brothers, you also have to know the song "This is why I'm hot". Anyone who listens to a radio the right way has heard this song. And you need to before you keep reading. "Hot" here is a synonym for "cool": accepted, admired, successful. In the song, Mims (that's the rapper's name) cites among other things his rapping skill, his blindly loyal fans, and his shady connections to prostitutes, drugs, and cars as reasons why he's "hot."

And then we have Mario and video games. Can you see the connection? A really catchy song that made it to #1 on the Billboard chart and was played endlessly in clubs is the setup for a bad pun. I can just picture it: some geek coming out of his cave of the latest video game console and being informed about the song "This is why I'm hot." And all the geek can relate himself to is video games. "Well," he says in an atrophied voice, "I'm hot when I have firepower." He grimaces as a stand-in for a real smile at his joke.

This shirt is for the self-aware, slightly self-deprecatory person to argue in fun that you can be cool and play video games, too. But it takes so much cultural understanding to get it that old geezers wouldn't even understand there's a conflict. And it's too bad they don't, because they want to tell kids what coolness looks like (tell me again, why shouldn't people smoke?) but can't follow the arguments about it on a practical level. On a t-shirt level. And are frustrated when kids accuse them of not understanding.

And that is why we shun, that is why we shun, that is why, that is why, that is why we shun.

This is College Life

I've wanted to do this since my junior year of high school, when I took a tour of UF and saw trees that looked perfect for being a college student in. This is college: perching out over the landscape of life; absorbed in who you are more than the book that already is; climbing trees for pleasure and profit; developing a respectable elitism over those not in your branch; escaping the ground. I think if we could read in relief--seeing everything but the text--everyone would get A's.

If I climbed one of these trees, I don't think I'd be as assiduously un-self-conscious about it as this guy was. I passed by him slowly, decided to take a picture, got out my camera, set up my shot, and left, and in the whole time positioning himself, he didn't look up once.

Other parts of college life are less poetic. I'm taking Differential Equations (Diff EQ--pronounced "diff ee cue") this semester and thought I could get by without doing any of the homework problems. I can't. We had our first test last week, and since I knew our final would supercede our lowest test grade, I wasn't too worried. Let's just say it's a bad sign when you get your test back and hope it's graded out of 50 points...

What once was lost has now been found, and what was found was not lost. My hat, which I lamented the loss of a few posts ago, ended up being right under a sofa in the Hub the next morning. I've worn it doubly fervently ever since. Yesterday I ran into Ferdaouis, who mentioned my "trademark" hat. My hat the lady-slayer is back.

I found something else recently, and thankfully it hadn't been lost. I was in a hurry to go to an RUF meeting, got there a few minutes late, rushed in and had a good time. When I came out a few hours later, though, I couldn't find my keys. I checked under my chair--no luck. But it wasn't a problem. They were right where I left them: in the ignition of my car. Which was still running. Save gas. Don't be in a rush.

And on that note, I retire to my bed, which hasn't seen me in far too long.

Assumptions

I think intelligence lies in being able to change your assumptions. Assumptions are generalities, of course, so I'm aware that what I'm saying isn't true in every case. That's what going to college is good for. So in honor of the beginning of school, I have four assumptions I've been learning about. I'll start with the most controversial:

1) Assume that senior girls are taken. I'm up to an age where it's worth looking at a girl's left hand to determine her stage of life. This summer at least ten couples I know got engaged. And now every senior girl worth her salt wants to get married and is in a relationship desperately pursuing that. I know, Alice is a senior and she's single. But I strongly suspect she's not worth her salt, either. (There's my first case of changing somebody's name. I should have a career in espionage if blogging doesn't work out.)

This is a difficult assumption for me to work into, because in the Christian scene, girls are single by default. They're all too frosty for the uncertainty of relationships. But the cool ones are single, too, because Christian guys haven't had practice wooing girls.

So now there's a tendency to continue that thinking. But senior girls are the most likely ones to have a long-distance relationship with some guy who's graduated and is just waiting to propose. Long-distance relationship for freshman can practically be discarded. Unless they've braved a summer together in high school, I haven't known a couple to survive the end of the year. Senior girls' dating lives are much more opaque. The helpful "relationship status" on Facebook is too crude for their maturity, and that's a good reason to assume that seniors are taken.

2) Americans haven't been to Kazakhstan. I saw a kid the other day wearing a shirt with the border of Kazakhstan, the country's name, and some quote from Borat. It took me longer to process the fact that most people who have seen Borat don't know Kazakhstan is a real country than to think that this guy had probably gotten it as a souvenir. After all, I'm wearing my Naxi t-shirt today which features the last living pictographic language in the world, because I've been to a place with lots of Naxi people. I almost asked him when he went to Kazakhstan, but then I caught myself.

3) Chinese teachers who speak really good English don't have American values. Today in my horribly boring "Chinese culture" class when we weren't watching a movie about China which featured several places I've personally been to, we had to do an exercise in interpreting Confucian sayings. Every group was supposed to pick a proverb from the book that no one's actually read and explain it to the class.

One group's proverb was "The gentleman desires to be halting in speech but quick in action. "Their spokesperson summarized it well for modern-day kids: "You gotta walk the walk," he said. "Can't just talk the talk."

Our teacher listened to this and thought that the group was saying that talking was a deficit. "Well, that's not quite right. Girls talk a lot," he said. "Growing up, girls talk to their mothers more than boys do, right? But they can still know things sometimes."

I realized that he was trying to defend women's rights. To him as a Chinese man, women obviously talk a lot, but he was being magnimous by saying that this didn't necessarily disqualify women from being wise.

All the American girls in the class heard him and thought he was the one being sexist. "No," one girl said out loud when he rhetorically asked if little girls learn to talk to their mothers. Because as Americans, our idea of equality is that women should act just like men do, and our teacher's saying that girls talk more denies that.

4) Oil is flammable even if a match doesn't ignite it. But that's just a teaser for my next post...