{"id":17592,"date":"2018-09-08T09:33:32","date_gmt":"2018-09-08T16:33:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/?p=17592"},"modified":"2018-09-08T07:13:51","modified_gmt":"2018-09-08T14:13:51","slug":"shoulder-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2018\/09\/08\/shoulder-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Shoulder up!"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

At the beginning of the school year, The Superintendent of Schools for Hartford exhorted the district\u2019s employees to Shoulder up!<\/a> That\u2019s the theme for the year, she said. The following week, the President of the University of Hartford adopted Shoulder up!<\/i> as a motto as well. In a recent memo, he asks everyone to Jump in, speak up, shoulder up, and reach out<\/i> to the students.\r\n

Searching the web, COCA and Google Books convinces me that the exhortation shoulder up<\/i> is not a common one. I\u2019m not saying that Ms. Torres-Rodriguez invented it, but I had never heard it. I assume that it is intended to be an ungendered version of man up<\/i> or cowboy up<\/i>, with the extra connotation of shoulder-to-shoulder<\/i>. Superintendent Torres-Rodriguez said, \u201cTogether our families, our teachers, our staff and our partners, including community, faith-based, higher education and businesses are all standing shoulder to shoulder.\u201d I don\u2019t personally like military metaphors for education, but they are fairly common; still, the OED lists the use of shoulder<\/i> as a verb for standing shoulder-to-shoulder is obsolete, and before its obsolescence it wasn\u2019t used with up<\/i>. The only uses of shoulder up<\/i> in the OED refer to inanimate objects\u2014one could say that the hill shoulders up steeply<\/i> or that a wall shoulders up the roof<\/i>.\r\n

My own connotation with the phrase shoulder up<\/i> is as part of the larger phrase shoulder up to the bar<\/i>, with the connotation of shoulder<\/i> in the sense of roughly pushing through a crowd. That\u2019s just me, though; no-one else I\u2019ve spoken to made that connection. Nor do I expect anyone else to connect the phrase with shoulder arms<\/i>, which connotes to me a reluctance to engage\u2014that\u2019s the cricket use, anyway, but in military drill, too, you can\u2019t fire a gun which is shouldered. But that\u2019s not what Ms. Torres-Rodriguez was referring to, was it?\r\n

No, eventually I figured out what Ms. Torres-Rodriguez was referring to, or at least I think I did, and it\u2019s something I know well but didn\u2019t bring to mind: the lyrics to \u201cAin\u2019t That Good News\u201d.\r\n

I\u2019ve a crown in the Kingdom
Ain\u2019t that good news
I\u2019ve a crown up in the Kingdom
Ain\u2019t that good news

I\u2019m going to lay down this world
Going to shoulder up my cross
Goin\u2019 to take it home to Jesus
Ain\u2019t that good news<\/blockquote>\r\n\n\n