Yesterday I said I would pick up the room after finishing the newspaper. And then I thought how funny that expression might sound to someone unaccustomed to speaking English. 'Picking up a room' would be immediately unstandable to English-speaking people, even if they happened to use other expressions such as 'ready the room.' [As a child visiting a young friend's Swedish English-speaking family, I thought 'ready the room' sounded quaint.] People accustomed to speaking English could easily make the transfer from the ludicrousness of actually picking up a room to other uses of 'to pick,' such as 'to picking something up' without blinking an eye and could, therefore, easily understand that you hadn't meant to literally pick up a room.
And all this speculation over yesterday's morning paper made me wonder about other expressions for setting a room in order--and whether you might have some local expressions that would present difficulty in interpreting for those who don't speak English fluently.
Belmarduk: I went ahead and started a new thread on this topc although your own on Miscellany about the your dictionary/not mine is closely related. I just didn't want to hijack your thread with a focus on picking up rooms, which interests me since it is a task I have mastered procrastinating.
Dear WW: I think "picking up a room" is an ellipsis for
"picking up (the trash in) a room".
In looking for a discussion of "ellipsis" I found a site
with helpful hints to writers, short, and easy to read:
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~schong2/rhet1b_2001/quoting.html
Funny I'd not thought about the phrase in the way you point out. But you sure made me think. Can you imagine the range of emotion fleeting across the face of the student of English as s/he worked it out ?!?
Now, to get to your question : sometimes I call it "Blitzing the room" - a fast cleaning - the kind made between the time you get a call company is on the way and the time the comapny arrives!
It's an Americanism with a capital "Jeez you ain't kiddin'"! The expression is never, to my knowledge, used anywhere else than in the US of, um, A. It sounds odd to me, even though I have heard it dunnamany times now. I always have this vision of someone bodily hefting the room into the air and then doing ... something ... with it!
We would say (and by we, I mean the bulk of the English-speaking world) "tidy up a room".
Sorry WordyWon!
Dear Capfka: and JohhHawaii might ask you why you needed
the "up".
It's just part of the expression, Bill. There's no logical, semantic or syntactical reason for the "up", it just is! "Tidying a room" would be as understandable as "tidying up a room". It's just not "correct".
Oh, Cap', I certainly didn't mean to imply that the majority of the English-speaking world uses the phrase
to pick up a room to mean to
tidy up a room. I simply meant that the majority of the English-speaking world could figure the term out easily in context, yet those who were not fluent in English would have difficulty with it.
To my American ear,
tidy up, which I've read, of course, sounds feminine. I would never imagine a man speaking of 'tidying up' a room--just as, I suppose, you cannot imagine a woman such as I picking up a room.
...or anyone else, for that matter, I suppose!
Not immediately understandable to me, even though I like to think that I am an English-speaking person. Similar to Capfka, my first reaction was "what the #$%^#%?!", then, a re-read to figure out what the phrase meant. My first reaction was that it was some of sort of pretentious interior designer (tautology?) lingo for "brighten a room's colour scheme", or the like.
I learned "tidy" from Kipling's The Elephant's Child. On his way back home, he picked up the banana peels he had
dropped because he was "a tidy Pachyderm". It was a long time before I found out what "pachy-" meant.
tidy
SYLLABICATION: ti·dy
PRONUNCIATION: td
ADJECTIVE: Inflected forms: ti·di·er, ti·di·est
1. Orderly and neat in appearance or procedure. See synonyms at neat1. 2. Informal Adequate; satisfactory: a tidy arrangement. 3. Informal Substantial; considerable: a tidy sum.
VERB: Inflected forms: ti·died, ti·dy·ing, ti·dies
TRANSITIVE VERB: To put in order: tidied up the house.
INTRANSITIVE VERB: To make things tidy: tidied up after dinner.
NOUN: Inflected forms: pl. ti·dies
A decorative protective covering for the arms or headrest of a chair.
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English tidi, in season, healthy, from tide, time. See tide1.
OTHER FORMS: tidi·ly —ADVERB
tidi·ness —NOUN
The etymology surprises me.
'Picking up' versus 'dressing down'? How about 'listen up, youse guys'? 'Speak up, I say'. The preverb up can be used to intensify the verb. 'Shut up'. But 'draw up' and 'bring up'. 'Lay up' versus 'put down'. Prepositions may start out spatially, but metaphor soon takes over. 'Vote down', 'dust down' versus 'dust up'. Bill's right, sometimes there's very little logic in the ways of language.
WW, my point was that most of the English-speaking world who don't have the benefit of a broad knowledge of Americanisms would not immediately be able to work out what "pick up" meant in this setting. They may be able to work it out from the context, but it's a colloquialism which is unique to the US and (I suspect) not all of the US.
From a REDBOOK magazine article:
Meet Dr. Greer • Past Columns
"How can I get my husband to pick up after himself?"
My husband has this maddening habit of dropping his dirty clothes all over the house, and I'm constantly picking up after him. No matter how much I complain, he keeps doing it. Is there anything I can do to get him to stop doing this?
Pick up your stuff! Clean your room! I’ve told my son that all his life.
I once asked a friend from Argentina to 'put a light under the kettle.' I can't remember her follow through exactly but it started with bafflement and ended with inaction.
Dear IP: to combine a couple Biblical quotes,
" Neither do wise virgins light a candle, and put it under a bushel." (or kettle)
We do understand "picking up after yourself", but the more generalised "picking up a room" is, well, foreign!
Dear Capfka: After a mother has used a complete sentence ten
thousand times to a kid, the sentence gets abbreviated.
>After a mother has used a complete sentence ten
thousand times to a kid, the sentence gets abbreviated.
Not here, not that one. As Capfka has made clear, the phrase "pick up a room" is NOT used here. "Pick up after yourself", yes, "tidy up the room", but not "pick up the room".
Dear Max: Capfka also said he believed the phrase was to be found only in small areas of US. WW uses it in VA, I learned it in MA, and I found fairly close quotes in two national magazines.
Good grief. I never in a million years meant that my expression picked up (if you will) from my own region was one that was used anywhere else other than in my own region.
My original request--way back up there--was simply to hear what other expressions others might use to mean the same thing. My friend from childhood from the Swedish family always referred to 'readying up the room,' which I mentioned sounded quaint to me as a child. My own family's expression of picking up a room, granted, would sound equally 'foreign' to those outside of my region. The only thing I was suggesting that was in context English-speaking people could figure out this somewhat bizarre expression and realize that I hadn't meant I was going to literally pick up the room, an obvious physical impossibility, but instead would consider other applications of the verb 'to pick up' thereby knowing what I meant when I said I was going to pick up the room.
Then I asked for expressions meaning to straighten a room (and that's one to think about: why? Was the room crooked?). I figured there would be some from your own regions that might prove to be equally confusing to non-English speaking people.
So, let me be clear: I never meant that my own expression of picking up a room was meant to be one familiar to all English-speaking people. I simply meant that it was one that English-speaking people would not find quite as hard to figure out as non-English-speaking people.
Wow chimed in well with blitzing a room. I feel like blitzing my communication efforts today that have certainly been less than effective.
In reply to:
Dear Max: Capfka also said he believed the phrase was to be found only in small areas of US.
No, he did not say that. He said, and I quote, "it's a colloquialism which is unique to the US and (I suspect) not all of the US." No mention there of a "small area", he simply said "not all".
>I feel like blitzing my communication efforts today that have certainly been less than effective.
Why so sensitive, WW? All that happened was that you said the phrase would be, quote, "immediately understandable to English-speaking people", and Capfka and I said that such might not be the case. Nothing there to get miffed at, surely?
I can't speak for all of English Canada but here, in English we ususally say clean a room (i.e. "go clean your room" to a kiddy) but that could be because we use the same expression in French (va nettoyer ta chambre).
Dear BelMarduk: I room can be perfectly clean, but need to be "picked up". In one of the sites I visited, the mother
told of breaking her ankle by stepping on cordless phone her
son had left in the middle of the carpet.
Max, I am NOT MIFFED.
[fanning-herself-with-playbill-from-Gone With the Wind-emoticon]
I am NOT MIFFED.
No of course not, you're Muffed, and down covered, and gloved, and hatted, and scarved, and layered with layers and layers of clothing..
(two giant snows storms are tracking east, the first has remained in a more southern track, (and is currently dumping snow on VA, not souther NY and new england!)
we are down in the single digits, (f) (minus for you C's) and Wow and her neighbors would be very happy to see single digit temps!
The command form, when my children were growing up, delivered by me and not their mother, was not to "pick up their room" but rather to "muck out the byre"!
a normal, and with kids around,
everyday expression in the two parts of the US that I've spent time: South Dakota and Vermont.
Wow and her neighbors would be very happy to see single digit temps!
You can say that again! It has been hovering at zero fahrenheit with winds that make it feel anywhere from 20 to 30 below. Exposed skin freezed in 15 minutes! So I have been housebound. A 20-degree day would be positively balmy!
So far we have missed the snows - BUT - tomorrow it is off to the polls in the N.H. Predidential Preferential Primary and I hope the forecast snow/sleet hold off until I get to cast my vote. Dog goes to groomer in morning so I am planning to vote and do grocery shoppping while he is being fluffed and beautified! Wish me luck!
Oh, I do wish you luck!
A fellow faculty member told us about riding his bike to school one morning here in Virginia, and that it had been so cold that his eyelid have briefly frozen to his eyeball and that he couldn't see. Nearly fell off his bike.
I had heard of this phenomenon happening during WWII, but never in a place such as Virginia.
Stay warm, Wow, and beware of keeping your eyes closed too long outside.
Ireland:
tidy up (intransitive)
tidy the room/house
"Tidy up the room" is possible, but sounds somehow effeminate(?) - I can't put my finger on it exactly.
I wouldn't understand "pick up the room" - the only way I could parse it was in terms of booking a hotel room, as in "I picked up the room for a bargain price".
I wouldn't understand "pick up the room" - the only way I could parse it was in terms of booking a hotel room, as in "I picked up the room for a bargain price".
yeah, but... my mother quickly learned american idioms, and spoke like a native (with a bit of a brogue!) i certainly was told 'pick up (the living room) or (dining room)' as a child growing up.
(and was told my own room looked like
the wreck of the hesperus
a den of iniquity
worse than the black hole of calcutta
terms that had many of my friends scratching their heads..)
actually most of them were meaningless to me until i looked them up.. In the 70's, i picked up a copy of Turners Wreck of the Hesperus--what a beauty.. (it was a mental reframe too.. one 'set of harsh critial words' that had been branded into my brain, became a thing of beauty.. should anyone today say i looked like the wreck of the hesperus, i would say, "Thank You!"
american have their own idioms.. but many are quickly learned.. (we don't get our knickers in a twist... but sometimes our panties get in a bind!)--
I don't remember ever being made to tidy my room as a kid so I can't contribute any local expressions. Housework always involved the other rooms in the house. When the place needed blitzing, my mum had a very effective method, she would get out four (one for each of us) binbags and say, 'if there is anything of yours not in your room in half an hour, it's going in the bin'. We had a game for communal mess, a parent would yell, 'cup hunt', and we would tear round the house finding all the cups and saucers left under beds and the like-- the one with the most items of crockery won. Probably well dangerous, but fun.
binbagthat's a new one for me...
We used to have some large spherical sacks half full of
"bins" that kids sprawled on watching TV.
"Clean your bedroom. All of it. "
A rhetorical device mothers find necessary.
The addition of a concluding sentence that merely emphasizes what has already been stated. A kind of amplification.
I've certainly heard 'clean your room,' 'straighten up your room,' and, of course, 'pick up your room' over the years.
'Tidy up' or 'tidy' both sound foreign to my ear, as did 'ready the room.'
'Blitz' sounds modern--and full of energy! But I've never heard it used around here till today.
I like the 'all of it!' because kids are prone to 'halfway do a job,' which, in adult measurement, isn't even halfway.
But what works best for me mentally is to think of 'setting' or 'getting' a room in order, a bigger challenge than most here might imagine.
dodyskin: binbag
eta: that's a new one for me...
So, what do you call bin bags then (black plastic bags to line dustbins/trashcans)?
Bingley
In reply to:
So, what do you call bin bags then (black plastic bags to line dustbins/trashcans)?
plastic trashbags
plastic liners for the trashcan
trashcan liners
50-gallon liners
...and so on. But never binbags! Ha! Binbags (I must not hyphenate because:) sounds so funny! It is a very comical-sounding name. If I were a writer for TV, I would definitely work binbag a lot into my scripts just for the sound of it! Now 'plastic liners'? No humor; no fun. Just functional. Blah!
While staying with a teacher friend in London I helped supervise a group outing of 6 year olds. One threw an apple core on the ground after lunch and when I told her not to litter she picked it up and tried to give it to me.
"Here, Miss"
"I don't want it. Chuck it in the garbage."
"What, Miss?" very puzzled look at the foreigner.
"Put it in the garbage can."
"Where, Miss?"
"In the . . ." desparate attempt to speak English instead of Canadian "In the . . . trash bin?"
"Oh, all-right Miss"
I can clean a room.
I can pick up a room.
But the two tasks are different. And both are perpetually needed around here.
The only other phrase which occurs to me is "my sisyphusian torture."
>the two tasks are different
prezactly, S'eye -- picking up is a quick method of removing the big, obvious bits; and doesn't get the room clean at all, unless you've very recently cleaned it!
-ron o.
dodyskin: binbageta: that's a new one for me...So, what do you call bin bags then (black plastic bags to line dustbins/trashcans)?well, usually I would say gargage bag, or, as WW mentions, trash bag. only rarely would I call it a liner, though that's what the manufacturers call them...
I know that I never use dustbin
which is why I'm always picking up my room, usually trash can, or simply "trash." as in, "throw it in the trash." oh, there's always "wastebasket", too. I probably use that most often, come to think of it.
what ete! you just throw stuff in the waste can or trash? you don't stop and think, does this go in the blue can? or the green one? can i trash this, or do i need to recycle it? and into which pile does it go?
we don't have dust bins (we have bins, but they are for storing good stuff.. Costco might have a bin of X, at some sort of wonderful costco price)and since coal is hardly used for residential heating any more, we also, for the most part don't have ash cans (think, correctly ashcans)-
i remember as a child, in ireland, my grandparents 'recycled' too, and had one can for ashes, (they heated with coal) one for trash and one for 'food waste' (that was collected by the pig man)
when my mom was on a rage, and having a general clean up, she threated (not idly!) to put stuff into (or out with) the garbage.
i would call binbags, garbage bags.. the big black ones are 'leaf bags' (you can't burn fallen foliage in most of US)--Leaf bags had special pick ups-they got recylced by the parks department.
for a big clean up, some rent a dumpster (a skip) and some apartments (like mine) have a 'trash chute' that loads the garbage into small dumpsters (on wheels) that are rolled in and out as they fill up.
what ete! you just throw stuff in the waste can or trash?heh. for that I just say, "throw it in recycling." or "recycling's over there, under the overhead."
my recycling
bin(!), is under my overhead projector...
Oh, I
know, we have a bottles bag, a tins bag, a newspaper bag, they all sit in the kerbit. Then there's the small slopbox, with which I feed the worm farm, which is really just a big bin with a tap on it, then there is the Wesley box for clothes and hardware. The swingbin really just has dust in it these days, and the dustbin has been retired in favour of the wheeliebin. Sometimes I think that the whole house has been taken over by rubbish receptacles, when it's meant to be a dody receptacle.
What's a kerbit? Why a worm farm? What's a Wesley box (I think I can suss out this last one...)?
Why a worm farm?--that's one i can answer...a worm farm is an apartment dwellers answer to a compost heap. (unfortunately, it gets too cold in NYC for the worms to winter over) you put your food garbage in, and get worm casting and compost out...
the composted soil+ worm castings is the best stuff you find for your potted plants (so you contain grown tomatoes are rich red and delicous!)
Dear of troy: You mentioned a chute for trash. One big problem with chutes. The VA hospital where I worked had
chutes for linen to go to laundry. Some asshole efficiency idiot put a stop to washing fecally soiled sheets on the
wards, claiming it could be done more efficiently at the
laundry. A couple years later it was discovered that the
chutes were heavily coated with feces, and emitting huge
clouds of bacteria into the wards every time the chute doors
were opened.
"What's a kerbit?"
Something you put out at the kerb/curb, I bet. With rubbish/garbage/trash in it.
'Kerbit' is a frog with a stuffy nose.
"The only other phrase which occurs to me is "my sisyphusian torture."
I think Sisyphus must have been a housewife (isn't that "Sisyphean"?)
As for picking up your room, or the impossibility thereof, I remember reading once in a comic strip someone remarking that the local bank had been held up by four armed men. To which his friend replied, "Well, if they all had four arms, I guess it was easy for them to hold up a whole building."
And four armed is four warned, so an octopus must be twice as well off.
Yes, of course, it's Sisyphean, but what I like about Sparteye's Sisyphusian is there's the soundof 'effusion' in it, which is a word I would easily relate to the family's things spread about that must disappear in twenty minutes before company arrives.
The cops shouldn't have any trouble finding the four-armed
men who robbed the bank.
http://www.gateshead.gov.uk/kerb-it/about1.htmThe first link on my search results page was this:
http://free.of.pl/k/kerbit/kerbit.htmI stared and stared,
almost able to read it...
Krzysztof, maybe you can tell me what language this is?
Looks Polish to me. The .pl in the url confirms this.
http://www.loc.gov/marc/countries/cou_pt2codes.html
... a Polish joke, but not a cruel one:
Polish guy goes to an English optician. The optician says "Read the top line of the chart to me." Polish guy says "Read it? I know him!"
why a worm farm?
It's all cobbles and urban deprivation where I live so no grass allowed, it might threaten the integrity of the squalor
. I'm building beds in my yard, when it stops raining/snowing/sleeting/hailing so I'll need compost and fertiliser. Hence worm farm, oh and also all that least possible footprint gubbins
Kerbits been covered.
Wesley box is for the community furniture warehouse on the end of my street. You can get furniture, books, and clothes there from about 20 pence. They also build basic computers ( I mean really basic) out of junked hardware. Most of the people who work there are unemployed volunteers. I dunno why it's called the Wesley though, most of the staff are punks, not methodists.
In reply to:
I'll need compost and fertiliser.
of troy nailed that one! Way to go, Ms. Troy!
> a locally based private company who specialise in waste and recycling.
If they are so wasteful it's hard to see why they got the contract.
Here we have a garbage collection company whose slogan is "Satisfaction guaranteed or double your trash back!"
If they are so wasteful
It's not unlike someone spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get a four year contract on a job that pays hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and claiming to be a fiscal conservative.
But, Fong, if that someone is forbidden by law from spending his own hundreds of millions, and must instead spend other people's money, isn't that true fiscal conservatism?
Are they forbidden from using their own? Seems like Ahnie contributed quite a tidy sum to himself. And is conning others the mark of a fiscal conservative?
In another forum, someone said, speaking of of The Governator, "Contributions made to an individual's campaign are hard money. A person's campaign is not the same as the person. If he's using his own money he has contributed to his campaign. There's federal limits to how much money one person can donate to any given campaign."
That's what I was basing my assumption on. That, and the fact if someone conserves his own fiscal resources by using those of other people, he is, at least on a personal level, being fiscally conservative. Maybe it should be a matter for a procurator fiscal.
Wbooooooa, boy! He's Austrian, not Scottisch!
>Here we have a garbage collection company whose slogan is "Satisfaction guaranteed or double your trash back!"
I HAVE heard better pickup lines.
>And four armed is four warned
Nah. Four-armed is malformed.
I've never heard of picking up a room, but a lesbian couple I know (one of whom hasn't come out to her parents) always talk of having to straighten up the apartment whenever the parents come to visit.
I tidy rooms (up). Spruce them up. Spring clean them, even. Pick up clutter, yes, but pick rooms up? No. Physical impossibility.
binbags, garbage bags.. the big black ones are 'leaf bags' (you can't burn fallen foliage in most of US
---------------------------------------
You can use the plastic bags for leaves? Heavens! Here they sell huge, heavy paper, biodegradable bags in supermarkets for the autumnal cleanups. If you put leaves out in plastic bags the Public Works men will not take them away.
Haven't smelled that wonderful autumn smell of burning leaves for many years. Ah, memories conjured.......
On another note - is the phrase "picking up" a person a US thing?
If a boy talks to a girl without being introduced in an effort to have her make a date with him or go for a cup of something he is trying to "pick her up."
In my day it was frowned on and telling your Mom a boy tried to "pick you up" was cause for concern! How times change!
Same thing in other places?
The term may of course have originated in the US, but it's common enough in the UK. I don't think I've heard it described as an Americanism.
On a related note: surely only a fallen woman would need picking up?
Bingley
One of the greatest lines I ever heard in a bar:
"No, I'm not picking you up, I'm picking you out."
Re: Greatest line ever: "I'm not picking you up, I'm picking you out."
In this case, you would say "I've very picky about whom I choose."