Dishing the Dirt
February 20th 2012 05:47
Well now, isn't this a curious expression?
"Dish" is a noun, right? Right. It's what you put your food on.
So how the heck is it a verb, too? And a verb that means - what, exactly? If a dish is a thing - an object - then how do you "dish" something? (For that matter, who'd put dirt on something you eat from?)
Dish happens to be one of those words that can be both a noun and a verb. In this case, the verb meaning is just the action that came out of the noun. If you can put something on a dish, then you can give it out - or"dish" it out. And dirt? Well, dirt is generally bad, right? So if you "have dirt" on somebody, you know something bad about them. And "dishing the dirt" is to tell people the bad things you know about somebody else.
Not all noun-verb words are so related, though. You might say, "Here is the door." But you wouldn't say, "Now I'm going to door something."
However, you might say, "This is a table," and then say, "Let's table this discussion," (Which means, depending on where you live, that you want either to discuss the issue right now - to put it "on the table" - or that you want to postpone it until later - to take it off the table. More on this another time.)
You could say, "This is my foot," and you could also say, "I'm not going to foot the bill for this," even though there's no relation between those meanings of "foot." (Just for the record, "footing the bill" originally meant to add it up and put the total at the bottom - the "foot" of the bill. )
But you could say, "Here's the bill," and also, "Let's bill them for this job," and those meanings of "bill" clearly are related.
What's a person to do who's trying to learn English? How does one know whether the noun-verb pairs are related in meaning, like bill and bill, or table and table, or whether they're not so related, like foot and foot. Are there rules for this?
Um-m. No, there aren't. You have to consider each word separately. If you have the time and interest, you could look up the history, or the etymology of the words in question, but most people aren't going to bother doing that. I probably wouldn't either, if the blog gods didn't make me do it.
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