Sometimes words too want company

 

Sometimes words too want company

Words are powerful tools and humans use trillions of them each day to say what they want to. Although pet-owners painstakingly explain how their feathered or four-legged ‘children’ express their emotions, I daresay it is not the same.  

 

Yet sometimes one word does not seem enough so we have created pairs of words which convey what we want to. They can be nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs or even prepositions, if you please. They can be similar like prim and proper, safe and sound, rest and recreation or opposites e.g. lost and found, love and war, hot and cold, and scores more. We have absorbed them so well that our language becomes more expressive and naturally, more beautiful too.

 

Earlier I had written about rhyming words: https://anupamaexcursions.blogspot.com/2021/06/lang-reduplicated-words.html

 

https://anupamaexcursions.blogspot.com/2021/06/reduplicated-words-ii.html

 

For my own as well as your convenience I have divided them into categories though I know of no such division in lexicon. Most of them are self-explanatory, so one may just tick them in the mind. Let me start with the few related to time:

 

Time

 

This precious word couples with many others to denote different meanings -  time and space, time and date, time and money, time and tide.

 

Now and again, now and then or on and off are different from now or never while once or twice is more specific. Also in use are sooner or later, before and after, day and night and morn and eve.

 

Elvis Presley even combined summer kisses winter tears for his famous song.

Place

This could simply be name and address, town and country or field and stream but track and field is a category in sports.

You move heaven and earth to do something but heaven or hell, according to most religions, are supposedly places where one goes to after death – heaven if you have been a good human being and hell in the reverse case.

Hither and thither and hither and yon have evolved into here and there with time. When and where can be included in either time or place category.

 

Situations

You might like peace and quiet for yourself and joy and peace for the world.

 

If you are in a difficult situation, you are left high and dry; but high and low means everywhere e.g.,  when you are searching for a misplaced/lost item. Rack and ruin means just what it says.

 

A pendulum moves to and fro, yet if you go back and forth, you are most probably indecisive and are changing your stand.

A couple getting married vows to stick with each other through thick and thin, trials and tribulations, come rain and shine, but if cracks show up in the relationship, they rush to the court and with a decree their marriage is null and void. Doesn’t that seem plain and simple?

 

Everything in this world works on the principle of cause and effect yet economy works on supply and demand.

 

In this world nothing is certain except death and taxes, said Benjamin Franklin which seems true for all times.

While slow and steady are said to win the race, one can apply slow and simple formula yet we all look for nice and easy or quick and easy ways. By trials and error you come to know what is right and wrong. 

If somebody is in pain and suffering, he may not be out and about. Some word-pairs - life or death, spic and span, chapter and verse, hook or crook, high and mighty, first come, first served, are so common that even giving examples would mean challenging your intelligence. Don’t we all use thunder and lightning or the opposites all or nothing, in and out, dead or alive, first and last without giving them much thought?

 

Somebody is down and out when he has no money, job or place to live. Down and dirty means getting extremely competitive/explicit while wild and wooly is like the image it makes in our minds-rough and barbarous.

According to Cambridge dictionary, if you do something on a wing and a prayer, you do it hoping that you will succeed, although you are not prepared enough for it.

A wink and a nudge is used when someone is talking about something in a sly, suggestive way, because the subject is embarrassing or because they may get into trouble if they say it openly.(Collins Dictionary)

Ride and die means loyalty. Originally ‘ride or die’ had nothing to do with a relationship as the phrase means today…It is a biker's expression meaning a person would rather die if he couldn't ride… Today people say, ‘she is my ride or die’ … means you have someone to ride out any situation with or you would die trying.

https://owlcation.com/humanities/Ride-or-Die-Original-Meaning-and-What-It-Means-Today

 

Crime and punishment go together, as do law and order. The law tells you in black and white the dos and don’ts of living in the society. So do not beat somebody black and blue. Prepare for truth or consequences because truth or dare is just a game.

I would call the following list of verb pairs as activity or movement-based.

Thanks to Elvis Presley, who does not know Rock and Roll?

When you kiss and make up, you are being friends again after a heated argument or fight. But kiss and tell has a negative connotation, i.e. you reveal all after a relationship is over.  

B&E in police dramas is breaking and entering. Sadly, tarring and feathering is a form of public torture and punishment  used to enforce unofficial justice or revenge. It was used in feudal Europe and its colonies in the early modern period, as well as the early American frontier, mostly as a type of mob vengeance, so says Wikipedia.

Search and destroy is actually a military strategy where the army does just that-search for the target and generally bomb to destroy it.

Hit and run is not hit or miss because in the former case you will play hide and seek with the law.

Touch and go, common in medical parlance, means the condition of the patient is grave and the doctor is uncertain of success. Come and go means to arrive and leave soon, and go and see is the action of going to see, or to be seen by, someone; an audition or interview, especially in fashion modeling (Oxford Dictionary). Come and See, however, was a 1985 Soviet anti-war horror film.

 

Aren’t we familiar with the opposites - give and take, sink or swim, work and play, win or lose, rise and fall, laugh and cry?

Can and will sounds so definite, almost like a promise or a threat?

Toss and turn, wait and see/wait and watch, read and write, mix and match, forgive and forget, signed and sealed, cash and carry are so well assimilated in our daily language that we do not even notice them.

Hemmed and hawed, ranting and raving, huffing and puffing are pictorial descriptions of how one behaves in tough situations.

They are more or less all the words that I knew. Do you think I made much song and dance about these pairs? The long and short of it is that by and large I have tried to keep this list short and sweet. Still I should stop before you are sick and tired (to be continued...)

                                                                                                -Anupama S Mani