"The House GOP Should Man Up Instead of Resorting to Political Theater in the Courts."

Writes Erick Erickson at Red State, and I don't have to read beyond that headline to know I want to blog this. I too think the lawsuit is political theater — bad political theater — but I think I'd forgo the masculinity disparagement (which continues with "I realize John Boehner and the House Republicans may lack the testicular fortitude to fight President Obama...").

You might remember that we were just talking about the phrase "man up," in a post titled "Is America's dominant 'man up' ethos a hypermasculine cultural construct, a tenet rooted in biological gender difference or something in between?" The post title isn't something I wrote, but something some NPR guy said. I questioned whether America had a "dominant 'man up' ethos," and in the comments, I wrote about the origins of the phrase "man up":

For what it's worth: The Oxford English Dictionary finds this as the earliest use of "man up" (to mean "To demonstrate manliness, toughness, or courage when faced with a difficult situation"):

1996 Palm Beach (Florida) Post 2 Mar. c1/2 He made a commitment, and to his credit, he manned up to it.

And I quoted from Ben Zimmer's "The Meaning of ‘Man Up'":

"One notable forerunner of man up as we know it today is cowboy up, a phrase that has been used in rodeo circles for decades.... Cowboy up wasn’t much known outside of rodeo country until 2003, when it became the rallying cry for the Boston Red Sox.... Man up owes its early popularization to another American sport: football, where it originally had a more technical meaning relating to man-to-man pass defense...."

Note that the earlier meaning of "man up" was not act like a man, but (to quote the OED again) "To supply with the full number of workers required" — that is, to get all the men you need on the the job, which actually would fit the idea Erickson presses on Boehner better than the "testicular fortitude"/masculinity notion.

By the way, the OED, on that older meaning of "man up," quotes some British writer in 1947 complaining about the unnecessary "up":

Must industries be fully ‘manned up’ rather than ‘manned’? Must the strong, simple transitive verb..become as obsolete in England as it appears to be in America?

We Americans do like adding "up" to verbs that might do without it. We don't just fill the glass, we fill the glass up, and we don't just drink the drink, we drink it up. We don't just build our self-esteem, we build it up. I'm calling that optimism, but maybe it's more of the phallocracy that dominates the ethos around here.