In the theater, actors who forget their lines are said to “go up” or to “go up on their lines.” But why go up? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Go Up On Lines”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Jesse.
Hello, where are you calling from, Jesse?
I’m Roanoke, Virginia.
Roanoke.
What can we do you for?
Well, I have a question about a phrase that I heard back when I was a technician doing theater, and it’s something that actors say, and I’ve never heard it anywhere else, and I’ve never heard it, I’ve actually never heard actors use it independent of being on stage.
And it’s a verb, and the verb is to go up.
As in, I guess the full version would be to go up on your lines.
You forget your lines.
You forget your lines and you need a prompt or something?
No, not necessarily a prompt.
I mean, just completely blank.
Okay, okay, interesting.
And you worked in theater?
I did.
Okay.
I did it as a college student and then a little bit post-college.
Did they say I went up on my lines?
Oh, I had such a bad afternoon, I went up on my lines three times?
Yeah.
Yeah, Jesse, I’ve done some asking around.
I tried to research this a while back, and I didn’t really come up with anything in the linguistic sources, but I asked a lot of friends who work in theater, and the explanation that they’ve most often been given, and you’ll understand this being a theater technician.
If you’re downstage, you’re where on the stage, Jesse?
You are closest to the audience.
Right.
And if you go upstage, then you’re back in the back of the stage, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And so if, for example, I mean, we get the word upstage somebody else from that.
If you’re going upstage, then you’re forcing the other actors to sort of turn toward you.
And you’re taking the and sort of turning their back to the audience.
So that’s where we get upstage.
And the explanation that I’ve heard from a lot of the classical actors around San Diego is that if you go up, it’s short for going upstage because the technical director or the stage manager would be there with lines if you needed them.
Does that make sense?
Interesting.
That does make sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It does make sense because usually there is a stage manager or an assistant stage manager hidden in the wings or behind the set doing things all throughout the show.
But generally they have a script on their lap.
Okay.
They know what to do.
-huh.
That’s interesting.
That makes a lot of sense.
I had a different idea on this, Martha.
There’s an old slang expression, to go up in a balloon, which means to be ruined or to come to nothing or to meet with disaster.
The earliest date in the historical dictionary of American slang is 1872.
And you can find it in a variety of theatrical sources over the following decades.
And sometimes they gloss it as just to balloon instead of to go up in a balloon.
Oh, really?
And they also gloss it, that is, define it as to go up in the air or to go up in one’s lines.
And in the U.K., they also call it to make an ascension instead of to go up or to go up on one’s lines.
So there’s a lot of different language here.
And I wonder if it just doesn’t have a relationship to this much older slang expression.
It just kind of became used in a very specific way in theater to mean to fail or just to come up dry, to come up empty.
Right.
They also say to dry up, don’t they?
That’s right.
That’s very interesting.
I considered two-week series, but both of them were sort of rooted in the actual actor’s business of scripts and life and stage and things like that.
But it doesn’t surprise me that there would be an older phrase that morphed as time went on.
Yeah, theater is the second oldest profession, right?
Exactly, exactly.
Wait a minute, it’s the oldest.
Isn’t advertising the oldest?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
Theater, advertising.
Right.
Wow.
Well, you’ve got two pretty interesting answers there.
I like that about the balloon.
I do, too.
I like that a lot.
All right.
Okay, cool.
Thanks so much.
All right.
Thanks, y’all.
Bye-bye, Jesse.
Thanks, Jesse.
All right.
Bye.
Well, let us know what you think.
Or send your questions about language to words@waywordradio.org.
