Vocabulary and Usage

Hello fellow Vocabularians,

Of interest,

an older BBC radio program, My Word,

available free through Internet Archive.

Erudiciously witty.

Spoiler Alert !

We’re all guilty of it. You’re not taping anything when you record, there’s no dial to turn when you're making a call, and your glove box has likely never had a pair of gloves in it if you live south of the Mason-Dixon line. —but you still say this stuff. Welcome to the graveyard of outdated technology, where the phrases just won’t die.

Tech & Media Throwbacks That Refuse to Quit

• Tape a show  What are you taping it to, exactly? Your cloud? Origin: VHS. Now: Streaming, DVR, or yelling at your smart TV.

• Footage    From film reels measured in feet. Still used for digital video—because “megabyte-age” sounds ridiculous.

• Dial a number  Haven’t seen a rotary phone since the Nixon administration, but sure, let’s “dial.”

The word UP certainly gives you a bang for your buck!  This measly little two letter word can mean just about anything under the sun. Eat up means EVERYTHING. Speak up? Don’t be shy. Talk up? Please promote. Get up? Start your day.  Quite a powerful punch for such a little upstart.

What I find particularly funny, though, is when the word “up” is used, not as an antonym, but as a synonym of its opposite, “down,” which doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense to me.

“Come on up!” means the same thing as “Come on down!” doesn’t it? Even  more common, “The car is coming DOWN the street” is identical in meaning to “The car is coming UP the street.”  How can a word’s antonym be its synonym?

My guess is (and this is, admittedly without having researched the topic, as I haven’t yet had my…