{"id":1238,"date":"2003-08-20T12:28:45","date_gmt":"2003-08-20T16:28:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dbnews\/2003\/08\/20\/kicking-sexed-up-around\/"},"modified":"2003-08-20T12:28:45","modified_gmt":"2003-08-20T16:28:45","slug":"kicking-sexed-up-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2003\/08\/20\/kicking-sexed-up-around\/","title":{"rendered":"Kicking Sexed Up Around"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a name='a704'><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I guess I&#8217;m not the only one wondering when &#8220;sex-up&#8221; became so popular in the sense of adding allure, carnality or sensationalism to something in an attempt to make it more popular ot impactful.  Like most readers, I assumed it was another quirky Britishism, but they, noting Americas prediliction for prepositional verbs, toss the blame back to us.<\/p>\n<p>Ten years ago Color Me Badd&#8217;s hit &#8220;I Wanna Sex You Up&#8221; indroduced a variation with a personal pronoun as object placed between the main verb and the preposition, although the proposition embedded is so obviously pornographic that it hardly seems the same idiom.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, as I was preparing to write a screed on sexed up I discovered it has already been done, and quite well and recently, by Jan Freeman in her<a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/stories\/storyReader$703\"> Globe Word column.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I guess I&#8217;m not the only one wondering when &#8220;sex-up&#8221; became so popular in the sense of adding allure, carnality or sensationalism to something in an attempt to make it more popular ot impactful. Like most readers, I assumed it &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/2003\/08\/20\/kicking-sexed-up-around\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":299,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1443],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-esl-links"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/299"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1238\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/dowbrigade\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}