{"id":94576,"date":"2016-10-25T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-10-25T21:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=94576"},"modified":"2019-03-13T10:32:56","modified_gmt":"2019-03-13T17:32:56","slug":"20161025-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20161025-00\/?p=94576","title":{"rendered":"Microspeak: lift up"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today’s Microspeak is the verb phrase “lift up”. Here’s a citation: <\/p>\n

[After a long detailed discussion.] I want to lift up a little and talk about why this is important. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I didn’t know what this intransitive sense of lift up<\/i> meant, and there wasn’t too much context here to work from, so I hunted around for other citations. The vast majority of uses were transitive, with the unsurprising meaning of “to raise”. But buried among the results were a few intransitive uses: <\/p>\n

It was useful to sit down and lift the discussion to the Western Europe level, not just the Germany level. This is a good way to lift up to take a broader view. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

From context, it appears that lift up<\/i> means “to take a higher-level view”. The next example seems to confirm this sense: <\/p>\n

Don’t start by going into detail about the new offering. Lift up a level and start by discussing how the new offering fits the overall strategy. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The word level<\/i> is not a direct object of lift up<\/i>; it’s telling you how much to lift up, not what to lift up. The implication is that you are lifting yourself<\/i>: When you lift up<\/i>, you are taking a higher-level view of the situation to see how the pieces fit together. <\/p>\n

The final citation I could find takes a somewhat different approach to the phrase lift up<\/i>: <\/p>\n

A team might be heads-down executing on their plan and can’t lift up to consider what to do next. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This contrasts lift up<\/i> with heads-down<\/i><\/a>,¹ and suggests that the implied direct object is head<\/i>: The team is so focused on executing their plan that they can’t lift up their heads<\/i> to consider what to do next. <\/p>\n

It appears that lift up<\/i> means different things depending on context. It could mean to shift the discussion to a higher-level topic<\/i>, or it could mean to disengage momentarily from an all-consuming task<\/i>.² <\/p>\n

¹ The metaphor for heads-down<\/i> is students hard at work, hunched over their desk, so that their heads are buried in their books and they are consequently unaware of their surroundings. <\/p>\n

² Interestingly, the first and last citations both came from the same person, suggesting more strongly that lift up<\/i> has multiple valid interpretations, and you need to pick the intended one from context. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Take a look around you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[105,26],"class_list":["post-94576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-microspeak","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

Take a look around you.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}