up

up, down

In geographical terms, down means south and up means north, and so you go up to Scotland from London and down to Atlanta (Georgia) from Chicago. A conventional exception to this straightforward logic arises with capital or major cities; for example it is customary to speak of going up to London from whatever direction. In the context of railways, the up line (or up train) is the one that goes into London, and the down line (or down train) is the one that goes out of London. This rule is not, however, absolute; from Edinburgh, for example, it would be more usual to talk of going (or driving or flying) down to London than up to it because Edinburgh is also a capital city and because distance makes the geographical orientation again the primary consideration.

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up

As well as its familiar uses as an adverb and preposition denoting a high place or position (jump up in the air / walk up the hill), up has an extraordinarily prolific existence in a role that can go unnoticed: as a particle forming a host of phrasal verbs such as come up, eat up, get up, look up, sit up, start up, take up, etc. In some of these, up is merely an intensifier that does not affect the basic meaning of the verb it is attached to: there is little difference in reality between eating your greens and eating up your greens except that the second is more positive. In other cases, the presence of up determines or affects the meaning in important ways: something comes up when it happens or occurs but the ordinary senses of come have no such connection; you can only look at something (i.e. look is intransitive) but you can look something up (i.e. look is transitive); and sitting up is almost but not quite the opposite action to sitting down. Most of these uses are based on native English words, and many of them have Latinate equivalents that sound more formal and often less idiomatic (arise or occur for come up, consult or refer to for look up, initiate or inaugurate for start up, accept or assume for take up, etc.). These uses of up cause amusement or amazement when people stop to think about them, but they lie at the heart of idiom and help define the Englishness of English. We should not be afraid to use them.