"hook up with" in England ...

[Joel S. Berson]

At 1/16/2013 04:32 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:
>And I recall one of my undergraduates (male,
>African-American, not that either is clearly
>relevant), responding to a problem set query in
>the late 1980s soliciting real life instances of
>lexical clones ("No, I wanted a SALAD salad"),
>reproducing this witnessed exchange:
>
>A:  Did you hook up?
>B:  Yeah, we hooked up.
>A:  Did you hook UP hook up?
>B: No, we just hooked up hooked up.
>
>Somewhat later, there was this exchange on a television dramedy:
>
>A:  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know you slept with
>Logan. I thought you two just messed around.”
>B:  “No, you said YOU just messed around with
>him. I said that he and I hooked up.  I meant hooked UP hooked up.”
>A:  “I thought you meant JUST hooked up, like messed around.”
>
>—dialogue among bridesmaids on Gilmore Girls 3/1/06
>
>Wonderful language we've got!

Clearly it's as ambiguous as I thought.

P.S.  The utterer of "hook up" in the Dear Margo
column was presumably American, so this is likely
not a British usage (the users of hook up were one American and one Brit).

Joel

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