Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

The English lexicon is fragile. It’s made up with strands of small threads. Rip out a few words and the Babel chaos of grunts, uh’s and ah’s would result. One of those threads is the word ‘up.’

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My friend Terry publishes the weekly Miller County Liberal. He writes up a column called “Up the Creek without a Paddle.” The heat index assures that he’s not doing much fishing or paddling up Spring Creek these days. It’s mainly about reporting on what’s up in Colquitt, the home town where I was raised up.

I prefer editorials that tease readers. Tiny but tasty morsels of gossip are better than Sunday fried chicken. They hint something’s up or someone’s up to no good. Salacious innuendo sells papers. Alas, Terry avoids these. After all, he has to face up to what shows up in print.

Small towns are sometimes hard up for news. The town’s sidewalks roll up for naps at noon. Most stores lock up at five on other days. Editors are forced to be chained-up in an office and dream up something creative. Looking up at a blank computer monitor with an upcoming deadline is an editor’s worst nightmare.

Shocking stories of infidelity or marital breakups, dished up in sufficient licentious detail, will usually light up the gossip circuits in small towns. Unfortunately, such revelations tend to split up a town, and stew up a lot of unnecessary upheavals and upset the stasis. The printed word can open up a can of worms.

Colquitt may be the intellectual Mecca of Georgia. Nuances of vernacular utterances don’t dodge notice. Last week the Twilight Think Tank had to give up and concede that ‘uphold’ is not the same as ‘hold up,’ or ‘holed up.’ Neither is ‘tearing up’ the road to Panama City not quite the same as ‘fixing up’ the mess that you ‘tore up.’ Small towns need such vapidity to break up the stifling boredom.

Most can call up experiences learned in small towns. They survive for years. High school is where kids live up to the hard knocks of life. Being described as a kid who’s ‘eat up with the dumb ass’ could lead to a personality hang up for life. Same as being uppity or stuck up. Old monikers morph slowly.

First girlfriends offer up instructive life lessons. Mine was really ‘uptight,’ and was caught up with ‘fessing up’ to her mother the details of every date. A blow up was inevitable. She couldn’t ‘warm up’ long enough to ‘loosen up,’ if you know what I mean. But why dredge up old frustrations. We moved on.

School yards or DQ’s after football games were superlative places to ‘man up’ on the differences between ‘upbeat’ and ‘beat up.’ And ‘upstanding’ conveyed an entirely different consequence after the event. Many picked up on that subtlety the hard way. Scars and missing molars tend to yield up a host of memories.

Knowledge of verbal double entendres will keep one up to speed. Up and running and successful run-ups are good things if you have a car. But it’s not the same as running up your credit card limits. But you had already wised up to that, right?

The term ‘made up’ can often get confusing. It could be used in the romantic sense of reconciliation, or it could mean you’re lying through your teeth about some embellished experience. Whichever, it’s generally agreed that its cousin, ‘make up’ is most often used when referring to women. I hear the female chorus tuning up now.

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Time to wrap up this verbalistic excursion. Decorum won’t permit adequate parsing of the term, ‘give it up.’ But since you’ve been around the block before, wise up and figure it out. Up, up and away!

Bud Hearn
May 22, 2014