{"id":6741,"date":"2012-03-10T12:36:11","date_gmt":"2012-03-10T12:36:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/blog\/?p=6741"},"modified":"2012-03-10T12:36:11","modified_gmt":"2012-03-10T12:36:11","slug":"to-ginger-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/?p=6741","title":{"rendered":"To ginger up"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The other day I came across the expression <strong>to ginger up<\/strong> in an <a href=\"http:\/\/dictionary.reverso.net\/english-french\/ginger\">English-French dictionary<\/a> (it&#8217;s <em>secouer<\/em> or <em>animer<\/em> in French). Examples given include:<\/p>\n<p>&#8211; the ideal man to ginger up the chat show formula<br \/>\n&#8211; Attempts to ginger up the tennis club&#8217;s social nights proved unsuccessful.    <\/p>\n<p>The French word <em>secouer<\/em> is used in the context of &#8216;gingering up&#8217; a person or organisation, while <em>animer<\/em>, which is related to animate, is used when gingering up involves making things more exciting. I can see how the application of real or metaphorical ginger might spice things up, but have never heard or seen the phrase &#8216;ginger up&#8217; used in this context. Have you?<\/p>\n<p>According to the Phrase Finder, <strong>to ginger up<\/strong> means to excite or enthuse, and an alternative version of the expression is &#8216;to get someone&#8217;s ginger up&#8217;. The former version was recorded by Francis Grose, in <em>A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue<\/em> (1785): &#8220;To feague a horse, to put ginger up a horse&#8217;s fundament, to make him lively and carry his tail well.&#8221; It then appears again in 1895 in reference to baseball.<\/p>\n<p>The latter version appears frist appears in print in 1843 in <em>The Attach\u00e9<\/em> by Thomas Haliburton, or <em>Sam Slick in England<\/em>: &#8220;Curb him [a horse], talk Yankee to him, and get his ginger up.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The other day I came across the expression to ginger up in an English-French dictionary (it&#8217;s secouer or animer in French). Examples given include: &#8211; the ideal man to ginger up the chat show formula &#8211; Attempts to ginger up the tennis club&#8217;s social nights proved unsuccessful. The French word secouer is used in the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,111,10,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-french","category-language","category-words-and-phrases"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6741\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.omniglot.com\/bloggle\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}