English has a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is up.

It’s easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP ,and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?

We call UP our friends and we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

At other times the little word has a real special meaning. People stir up trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special. And this UP is confusing: a drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP , look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don’t give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.

When it rains, it wets UP the earth. When it doesn’t rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but I’ll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so, time to shut UP …!

Special thanks to John for the e-mail!

“Google Plants Solar Trees” was the headline of the Wired link in my inbox. I thought it was a joke and considered going straight to snopes.com, but something made me decide to read a little first. Turns out it’s actually a terrific metaphor at work.

This Park ‘n’ Ride in Vacaville, California, built by Energy Innovations, has solar “trees” and plug-ins for hybrid vehicles.

Google isn’t planting trees; they’re installing huge solar cells on supports in the parking lot. The solar cells will generate shade and protection from the elements, and will produce enough energy, it is hoped, to meet about 1/3 of the electrical needs at the complex.

Envision Solar, a company that produces a similar product, says this:

It is a graceful analogy, really — just as a citrus grove absorbs sunlight to produce food we consume, a Solar Grove™ absorbs sunlight and produces energy. The language of the analogy continues — the frame and modules of the Solar Tree become its “canopy,” the support structure becomes the “limbs” and “trunk,” while the support structure and wiring beneath the earth is known as the “taproot.” … During the day, these translucent models allow dappled sunlight to pass through to the ground — again, a bit like leaves on a real tree would allow.

A similar design is already in place at Kyocera in San Diego, where the panels have generated more electricity than originally expected.

Web users can track the amount of energy produced at Kyocera and consider different types of pollution that were avoided because this technology was introduced.

Another measure of the concept’s success lies in capturing the public imagination. Seeds for a solar tree, anyone?

Students sometimes wonder why we ask them to think in terms of metaphor and analogy. Here’s one more object lesson you can point to.

Three English words end in -gry. Two of them are angry and hungry. What is the third word?

Every year at about the same time, students would enter an AOL tutoring room with this question. My online tutoring colleagues and I suspected the puzzle was included in a textbook somewhere, and that teachers reached the same point at about the same time.

We did the best we could with this doozie. I was always afraid teachers might mark our answers wrong if they didn’t agree with whatever was in the teacher manual.

But the truth is that the answer depends on how the question is interpreted. Check it out:

• World Wide Words
• Snopes Urban Legends
• Wikipedia

I hope the textbook publishers will let this one rest now.

(Image source: http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Image:Dictionary_Cat.jpg)

Images like this one can be found at LOLcats.com and other places online, sporting humorous captions. The phrasing of this image’s caption originated with online games and spread throughout the Web. The grammar for the meme is consistent: it has to be “I’m in ur *noun* *verb*ing ur/my *second noun*”. The second noun is usually plural. As the idea spread, some writers have modified it.

Here are some examples:

• Spaceship
• e-Bay
• Newspaper
• Couch
• Drums
• Snoozes