upped and...

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:15 AM +0100 7/13/04, Michael Quinion wrote:
>Laurence Horn wrote
>
>>  I just got around to watching an episode of The Forsyte Saga from BBC
>>  on a tape I'd made a few months ago.  I have no idea if this dialogue
>>  is taken straight from Galsworthy, but at one point Jolyon Forsyte
>>  acknowledges to his detested cousin Soames (the former's son Jon has
>>  fallen in love with the latter's daughter Fleur, in defiance of the
>>  animosity between the branches of the family) that "Jon just upped and
>>  left last night without a word".  I rewound several times to confirm
>>  the final cluster in [@pt]; it's definitely audible.  (This part is set
>>  in the early 20th century, and the characters are upper crust, albeit
>>  nouveau.)
>
>It sounds remarkably unlikely to me. I checked the complete Project
>Gutenberg Galsworthy files and there is no instance of "upped" in
>this sense (though there are two of "thin-upped", which from context
>looks like an uncorrected OCR misreading of "thin-lipped").
>
Ah, OK.  An anachronism in the adaptation, then.  (Actually a double
one; in subsequent dialogue, Soames relates to Fleur that Jon had
"upped and gone", using the participial form of the verb "to up" in
the serial construction.)

larry