chat up and smarten up

[Lynne Murphy]

This week's "The K Chronicles" comic
(<http://www.salon.com/comics/knig/2006/08/09/knig/index1.html>) uses _chat
up_ apparently to mean 'chat with' (i.e. without the 'hit on' meaning that
_chat up_ has in British English).  I don't know this as US English, but is
it?

[For those who don't know the comic, it's mostly autobiographical, and so
the writer can expect regular readers to know that he's married to a woman,
and presumably not interested in hitting on a male journalist.  The content
of the journalist's talk, about the situation in Iraq, also seems to force
a 'chat with' interpretation. I suppose it could take a non-flirtatious
'chat to impress' interpretation, but again I'm not familiar with such a
sense.]

Also...as long as 'up' verbs are on the agenda, I just noticed that the OED
online lists no 'clever' senses for the verb _smarten_, so I'll just
mention it here in case anyone Oxfordy is listening.  There seem to be at
least two such uses of _smarten up_ not covered: 'become more savvy' as in
"Open source firms need to smarten up to sell to government"
(<http://www.techworld.com/applications/news/index.cfm?newsid=5694&pagtype=samechan>),
'make more intellectual'--i.e. the opposite of 'dumb down', as in " My
question is, should televison smarten up or will we be stuck with stupid
programmes?"
(<http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/showthread.php?t=438038>).


Dr M Lynne Murphy
Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language
Arts B133
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN

phone: +44-(0)1273-678844
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com

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