Mind your language | 24 April 2010

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.

There is no doubt that next up is an Americanism, and not much more than 30 years old. The Oxford English Dictionary hasn’t recognised the phrase first up at all, though the words occur in a quotation intended to illustrate the use of maddie, meaning ‘a tantrum’: ‘First up was Alex Higgins taking a world-class maddie in a Stockport hotel.’

The dictionary, in a clutch of quotations added in 1997, attributes the origin of listen up to the United States Armed Forces from the 1970s. As it notes, the construction is usually in the imperative. So is my husband’s response, shut up, which Trollope used in Dr Thorne (1858). ‘On this occasion he seemed to be at some loss for words: he shut up, as the slang phrase goes,’ he wrote in one of his passages about hunting, where slang might be allowed to creep in, if not to the degree allowed by a bad set at Cambridge, ‘who were fast and slang, and nothing else — men who imitated grooms in more than their dress’.