|
|
Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Mar 29, 2014 23:10:46 GMT 5.5
This thread presents the usage of certain carefully chosen English words and phrases in current speech and writing. Examples are drawn from a wide range of contemporary books, newspapers, journals, blogs and audio-visual sources such as radio and television programs, movies, podcasts, etc.
Comments and queries are most welcome. Contributions will be highly appreciated. |
|
|
|
Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Mar 30, 2014 0:21:56 GMT 5.5
down on meaning down from or low compared with
Read the sentence in bold face below with an emphasis on down on highlighted in light blue. The sentence has been put in context so that the meaning is clearer. With pressure on housing stock growing, the number of private tenants has continued to rise while the number of homeowners has been falling. In 2012-13, the English Housing Survey counted 14,337,000 homeowners, down on 14,388,000 in 2011-12. There were 3,956,000 private tenants in 2012-13, an increase from 3,843,000 in 2011-12.
Source: The Guardian (Saturday, 29 March 2014) As is clear from the context (if you did not come across this usage until now), down on in this usage means down from. Here we should be wary of reading down together with count, because together they sound quite precariously close to count down (to something), meaning to think about a future event with pleasure or excitement and count the minutes, days, etc. until it happens which has nothing to do with the meaning of our current phrase. However, it should be noted that though count and down in this usage have no syntactical (=grammatical) relation, you may often find them together, but this should not mislead you into thinking that down on cannot occur independently of count. Of course it can, as in: As with all of our workshops, we had done a good recce of the location beforehand. The long Winter had forced a late Spring and we had some concerns about whether the birds would be around in sufficient numbers. When we checked two weeks before there had been a few dozen Kittiwakes, about a dozen Fulmars and one solitary Razorbill pair but when we checked again just one week before the workshop, we were pleased to see large numbers of Razorbills and Guillemots and a substantial increase in Kittiwake and Fulmar too.
In the same way, you can use up on to mean up from or higher compared with, as in Sales are up on last year. |
|
