Dowbrigade

I guess I’m not the only one wondering when “sex-up” became so popular in the sense of adding allure, carnality or sensationalism to something in an attempt to make it more popular ot impactful. Like most readers, I assumed it was another quirky Britishism, but they, noting Americas prediliction for prepositional verbs, toss the blame back to us.

Ten years ago Color Me Badd’s hit “I Wanna Sex You Up” indroduced a variation with a personal pronoun as object placed between the main verb and the preposition, although the proposition embedded is so obviously pornographic that it hardly seems the same idiom.

Anyway, as I was preparing to write a screed on sexed up I discovered it has already been done, and quite well and recently, by Jan Freeman in her Globe Word column.