Like a baby that throws its rattle from the pram each time it is handed back, my husband responds to specific stimuli from the television. Every time he hears the phrase next up, he shouts, ‘Shut up!’ This exclamation also serves as a response to first up, and even listen up.
English is rich in phrasal verbs, but the prepositions recruited for them seem to have become unruly recently. We are suffering from prepositionitis, and up is getting particularly uppity.
Uppity itself is American in origin, not dating from much earlier than Joel Chandler Harris’s ‘Uncle Remus’ stories (1880): ‘Hit wuz wunner deze yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck,’ says the narrator of the tale of the sparrow’s misplaced trust in Brer Fox. For a couple of centuries, British English had already been employing the word uppish, though often with the meaning of ‘elevated in spirits’ — as upon the death of the King of Spain in 1704.
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