system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why is the word "up" used so often in seemingly inappropriate ways? How can I "give up" or "fill up"?
gpt
Yeah, English has lots of weird ones like this: break up, break down, look after, bring about, throw away, fuck up, face off, pass on, give in, give out, give away, give off...

And the really annoying thing is that for a lot of them, you can't figure out the meaning even if you know what 'give' and 'up' mean, which makes them really tricky for foreign learners to pick up, as they just have to memorise all the meanings in order to get by.

They are called phrasal verbs - you have a verb (like 'give') followed by one or two prepositions (eg: up, down, in, on, out, off, to, at...). When these are part of a phrasal verb, they're called particles, but that's not important.

Originally phrasal verbs in English mainly referred to movement. So when you look up at the sky, it's fairly appropriate to use 'up', as it tells us the direction you were looking. Similarly, with fall down, it seems appropriate to use 'down', as that is the direction you are falling. Same for get out/in/off/on, take away.

But as you said, we've got lots of phrasal verbs that don't seem to have anything to do with the direction. Breaking up with your partner has nothing to do with 'up'.

Two things: First, phrasal verbs have acquired metaphorical meanings, based on the physical meanings. So 'look up to' (admire) and 'look down on' (feel superior to) don't have anything literally to do with up or down, but they do metaphorically - we use the visual image of looking upwards at someone taller, older, or more mighty than you to symbolise admiration, and the opposite for look down on.

Second, in phrasal verbs, 'up' has a second meaning in addition to the direction. It can also mean 'to completion'. So when the village is burned up, it means burned entirely. When a person gives up, it means they have totally resigned their intentions. Most of the phrasal verbs with 'up', it seems, are using this 'to completion' meaning, although there are other ways of using 'up'. When you dress up for a formal dinner, the 'up' seems to mean 'to a high standard'. When you 'fill up' a pitcher, you are filling it up to a supposed mark on the side.

Is it appropriate for 'up' to have the 'to completion' meaning? Yeah, it seems so, to me at least. It makes sense that we would associate fullness, or totality, with the up direction, and so use it to symbolise that.

And then because the 'up' phrasal verbs are so common, we end up with lots more of them, with slightly vaguer connections to the original meaning, because the rules loosened up due to people just talking away and coming up with new and interesting phrases. Or sometimes a new phrase just pops up out of nowhere.