LINGUIST List 12.1431

Thu May 24 2001

Sum: "Up and Down"

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Marc Picard, Up and Down

A couple of weeks ago, I submitted the following query to the List:
Linguist 12:1312

"While at a baseball game with a (non-linguist) friend of mine the other
night, he asked me why balls were hit 'down the line' but 'up the alley'
(right-center or left-center field). Although I have some idea of why we say
things like 'up north' and 'down south', I had to admit I had no clue about
the use of up and down in that context. Can anybody suggest anything that I
can pass along? Also, a reference or two on how all this stuff works in
general would be welcome."

Surprisingly, I only received four replies. Two respondents offered
references:

"I suggest you have a look at work by Lakoff (staring with Lakoff and Johnson
1984 Metaphors We Live By) on orientational metaphors and how we conceptually
organize space. There is a vast amount written on this so I can't, for reasons
of time and space, include it all here. It even has a web page."

Fiona Macarthur Purdon <fionamacunex.es>

"Cognitive Grammar has a whole literature on preposition meaning. For 'up' and
'down' you might try Susan Lindner's CLS article (around 1986??) and her
dissertation (UCSD). More generally, look at Women, Fire and Dangerous Things
(G. Lakoff, 1987) at the case study on 'over' and also Claude Vandeloise's
"L'espace en francais" (Seuil, I think, early in the 1990s) for French
prepositions in the same framework."

Margaret E. Winters <mew1siu.edu>

Another dealt specifically with my allusion to north as 'up' and south as
'down':

"As a matter of interest, what was your explanation of 'up north' and 'down
south'? Is it purely because of the way modern maps are drawn, or do you have
another explanation? In the Gaelic languages (Irish, Scottish Gaelic) it works
the other way round. One is up in the south and goes down north. There is a
logic to this when one considers the way Irish adverbs of setting and
direction work, in relation to the movement of he sun: The word for the south
has the same origin the word for the right hand, west also means behind you,
the word for the north can also mean left. If something moves sunwise (ie
clockwise) we say it has southern movement, which is also 'right', 'correct'
movement. Therefore something moving in circles northwise is unnatural,
disturbing. The sun is at its highest in the south in the northern hemisphere.
In this sort of context it is easy to explain why one goes up south towards
the sun, and down toward the darker area. I think that a lot of European and
probably Indo-European cultures have or had some similar system. In the
neo-Latin languages, for example (French, Itlaina, etc) the south is generally
called the 'mid-day', or some such. Breton actually equates the north with
'mid-night'. Does English behave differently, or is this purely the influence
of maps showing north at the top of the page?"

Tadhg.OhIfearnain <Tadhg.OhIfearnainul.ie>

This is exactly what I had in mind, as a matter of fact. The only response I
received that dealt specifically with baseball was the following:

"I think you can also say 'up the line' (as well as 'down'), but you
definitely cannot say 'down the alley'. Perhaps the difference is due to the
fact that when you hit the ball 'up the alley', it's clearly a fair ball and a
safe hit (even extra bases), and thus, a good result. When you hit the ball
'down the line', my intuition tells me that it's likely as not to go foul,
thus, not an especially good result. However, it seems to me that you would
only say that the ball has been hit 'up the line' if you're pretty sure it's
going to stay fair, again, a good result.
Maybe the relevant generalization, then, is that, metaphorically, "good is up"
and "bad is down"? (cf. Lakoff & Johnson 1980:16)."

Richard Epstein <repsteincamden.rutgers.edu>

This interpretation gave me the idea of looking for the expressions 'hit down
the line' and 'hit up the line' on Google. I found that (a) references to the
former outnumbered the latter by about 25 to 1, (b) most of these references
were about tennis rather than baseball, and (c) there was no detectable
association of 'up' with a positive result and 'down' with a negative one. So
I guess there's simply no 'right' answer to this: both expressions are used
but one much more than the other. As for 'hit down the alley', I found no
references to it in relation to baseball.

Anyway, many thanks to those who took the time to reply.

Marc Picard