What's up?

Lovers of the English language might enjoy this ..The guy who sent it to me surely did.

There is a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that is 'UP.'

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP ?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP?

Why do we speak UP and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?

We call UP our friends.

And we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver; we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen.

We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

At other times the little word has real special meaning.

People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing, but to be dressed UP is special.

A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look the word UP in the dictionary.

In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost th of the page and can add UP to about 30 definitions.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used.

It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP.

When the sun comes out we say it is clearingUP.

When it rains, it wets the earth and often messes things UP.

When it doesn't rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP,

for now my time is UP,

so........it is time to shut UP!

HOW WE SURVIVED

The older we get the more we wonder about how we all lived until now. If you're under 40 you probably won't understand. But the reader who submitted this was well over 40, so he understands it all too well.

The reader disclosed that his mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread Mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but no one seemed to get food poisoning.

His mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter and he used to eat it raw sometimes. His school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but he can't remember getting e..coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool, no beach closures then.

The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.

We all took gym, not PE ... and risked permanent injury with a pair of high topKed's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. He can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

Flunking gym was not an option... He guesses PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses?Ours wore a hat and everything.

He thought that he was supposed to accomplish something before he was allowed to be proud of himself.

He just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, and X-box.

And where was theBenadryland sterilization kit when he got that bee sting? He could have been killed!

He played'kingof thehill'on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites, and when he got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle ofmercurochrome(kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then he got his butt spanked.

Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics, and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

He recalls his friend Donny from next door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop, just before he fell off. Little did his Mom know that she could have owned his parents' house. Instead, she picked him up and swatted him for being such a goof. It was a neighborhood runamuck.

How did we ever survive?