Phrasal Verbs Reference

The following table is an alphabetical reference chart of the most commonly used English phrasal verbs with following explanations. You should remember that native speakers of English tend to use phrasal verbs in everyday conversation and generally reserve one-word verbs (i.e. "investigate" instead of "look into") for more formal occasions such as business letters etc.

Please note that all phrasal verbs marked by an asterisk (*) are NON-separable verbs (i.e. the preposition MUST follow the main verb. For example: I called on Dan NOT I called Dan on!). Verbs that are not marked by an asterisk (*) are separable verbs (i.e. the preposition may or may not follow the main verb. For example: I brought the children up OR I brought up the children).
IMPORTANT
Remember that separable phrasal verbs using a pronoun as the object of the verb MUST be separated (I brought them up NOT I brought up them)

A	Ask out	Ask someone to go on a date
B	Bring about	cause
	Bring up	1) rear children 2) mention or introduce a topic
C	Call back	Return a telephone call
	Call in	Ask to come to an official place for a special reason
	Call off	cancel
	Call on*	1) visit 2) ask a student a question in class
	Call up	Call on the telephone
	Catch up (with)*	Reach the same position or level as someone
	Check in*	Register at a hotel
	Check into*	investigate
	Check out	1) borrow a book from a library 2) investigate
	Cheer up	Make (someone) feel happier
	Clean up	Make clean and orderly
	Come across*	Find by chance
	Cross out	Draw a line through
	Cut out	Stop an annoying activity
D	Do over	repeat
	Drop by*	Visit informally
	Drop in (on)*	Visit informally
	Drop off	Leave something/someone somewhere
	Drop out (of)*	Stop going to school or class
F	Figure out	Find the answer by logic
	Fill out	Complete a form
	Find out	Discover information
	Get along (with)*	To have a good relationship with
	Get back (from)	1) return from somewhere 2) receive again
	Get in, get into*	1) enter a car 2) arrive
	Get off*	Leave any vehicle
	Get on*	Enter any vehicle
	Get out of*	1) leave a car 2) avoid some unpleasant activity
	Get over*	Recover from an illness
	Get through*	finish
	Get up*	Arise from bed, a chair etc.
	Give back	Return something to someone
	Give up	Stop doing something
	Go over*	Review or check
	Grow up*	Become an adult
H	Hand in	Submit an assignment
	Hang up	1) Stop a telephone conversation 2) put up clothes on a line or a hook
	Have on	Wear
K	Keep out (of)	Not enter
	Keep up (with)*	Stay at the same position or level
	Kick out (of)	Force (someone) to leave
L	Look after*	Take care of
	Look into*	Investigate
	Look out (for)*	Be careful
	Look over	Review or check
	Look up	Look for information in a reference book
M	Make up	1) invent 2) do past work
N	Name after	Give a baby the name of someone else
P	Pass away*	Die
	Pass out	1) distribute 2) lose consciousness
	Pick out	Select
	Pick up	1) go to get someone 2) take in one's hand
	Point out	Call someone's attention to
	Put away	Remove to an appropriate place
	Put back	Return to original position
	Put off	Postpone
	Put on	Dress
	Put out	Extinguish a cigarette, fire
	Put up with*	Tolerate
R	Run into	Meet by chance
	Run across	Find by chance
	Run out (of)	Finish a supply of something
S	Show up*	Appear, come to
	Shut off	Stop a machine, equipment, light etc.
T	Take after*	Resemble
	Take off	1) remove clothing 2) leave on a trip 3) leave the ground (aeroplane)
	Take out	1) take someone on a date 2) remove
	Take over	Take control
	Take up	Begin a new activity
	Tear down	Demolish, reduce to nothing
	Tear up	Tear into many little pieces
	Think over	Consider
	Throw away	Discard; get rid of
	Throw out	Discard; get rid of
	Throw up	Vomit
	Try on	Put on clothing to see if it fits
	Turn down	Decrease volume
	Turn in	1) submit classwork 2) go to bed
	Turn off	Stop a machine, equipment, light etc.
	Turn on	Start a machine, equipment, light etc.
	Turn out	Extinguish a light
	Turn up	Increase volume or intensity

Why the Oscars are a Con

by John Pilger

Why are so many films so bad? This year’s Oscar nominations are a parade of propaganda, stereotypes and downright dishonesty. The dominant theme is as old as Hollywood: America’s divine right to invade other societies, steal their history and occupy our memory. When will directors and writers behave like artists and not pimps for a world view devoted to control and destruction?

I grew up on the movie myth of the Wild West, which was harmless enough unless you happened to be a native American. The formula is unchanged. Self-regarding distortions present the nobility of the American colonial aggressor as a cover for massacre, from the Philippines to Iraq. I only fully understood the power of the con when I was sent to Vietnam as a war reporter. The Vietnamese were “gooks” and “Indians” whose industrial murder was preordained in John Wayne movies and sent back to Hollywood to glamourise or redeem.

I use the word murder advisedly, because what Hollywood does brilliantly is suppress the truth about America’s assaults. These are not wars, but the export of a gun-addicted, homicidal “culture”. And when the notion of psychopaths as heroes wears thin, the bloodbath becomes an “American tragedy” with a soundtrack of pure angst.

Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker is in this tradition. A favourite for multiple Oscars, her film is “better than any documentary I’ve seen on the Iraq war. It’s so real it’s scary” (Paul Chambers CNN). Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian reckons it has “unpretentious clarity” and is “about the long and painful endgame in Iraq” that “says more about the agony and wrong and tragedy of war than all those earnest well-meaning movies”.

What nonsense.  Her film offers a vicarious thrill via yet another standard-issue psychopath high on violence in somebody else’s country where the deaths of a million people are consigned to cinematic oblivion. The hype around Bigelow is that she may be the first female director to win an Oscar. How insulting that a woman is celebrated for a typically violent all-male war movie.

The accolades echo those for The Deer Hunter (1978) which critics acclaimed as “the film that could purge a nation’s guilt!”  The Deer Hunter lauded those who had caused the deaths of more than three million Vietnamese while reducing those who resisted to barbaric commie stick figures. In 2001, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down provided a similar, if less subtle catharsis for another American “noble failure” in Somalia while airbrushing the heroes’ massacre of up to 10,000 Somalis.

By contrast, the fate of an admirable American war film, Redacted, is instructive. Made in 2007 by Brian De Palma, the film is based on the true story of the gang rape of an Iraqi teenager and the murder of her family by American soldiers.  There is no heroism, no purgative. The murderers are murderers, and the complicity of Hollywood and the media in the epic crime in Iraq is described ingeniously by De Palma. The film ends with a series of photographs of Iraqi civilians who were killed. When it was order that their faces be ordered blacked out “for legal reasons”, De Palma said, “I think that’s terrible because now we have not even given the dignity of faces to this suffering people. The great irony about Redacted is that it was redacted.” After a limited release in the US, this fine film all but vanished.

Non-American (or non-western) humanity is not deemed to have box office appeal, dead or alive. They are the “other” who are allowed, at best, to be saved by “us”. In Avatar, James Cameron’s vast and violent money-printer, 3-D noble savages known as the Na’vi need a good guy American soldier, Sergeant Jake Sully, to save them. This confirms they are “good”. Natch.

My Oscar for the worst of the current nominees goes to Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s unctuous insult to the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Taken from a hagiography of Nelson Mandela by a British journalist, John Carlin, the film might have been a product of apartheid propaganda. In promoting the racist, thuggish rugby culture as a panacea of the “rainbow nation”, Eastwood gives barely a hint that many black South Africans were deeply embarrassed and hurt by Mandela’s embrace of the hated Springbok symbol of their suffering. He airbrushes white violence – but not black violence, which is ever present as a threat. As for the Boer racists, they have hearts of gold, because “we didn’t really know”. The subliminal theme is all too familiar: colonialism deserves forgiveness and accommodation, never justice.

At first I thought Invictus, could not be taken seriously, then I looked around the cinema at young people and others for whom the horrors of apartheid have no reference, and I understood the damage such a slick travesty does to our memory and its moral lessons. Imagine Eastwood making a happy-Sambo equivalent in the American Deep South. He would not dare.

The film most nominated for an Oscar and promoted by the critics is Up in the Air, which has George Clooney as a man who travels America sacking people and collecting frequent flyer points. Before the triteness dissolves into sentimentality, every stereotype is summoned, especially of women. There is a bitch, a saint and a cheat. However, this is “a movie for our times”, says the director Jason Reitman, who boasts having cast real sacked people. “We interviewed them about what it was like to lose their job in this economy,” said he, “then we’d fire them on camera and ask them to respond the way they did when they lost their job. It was an incredible experience to watch these non-actors with 100 per cent realism.”   

Wow, what a winner.

John Pilger is a frequent contributor to Global Research.  Global Research Articles by John Pilger