Catch up: meaning and examples

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Having stopped once, a person has to catch up for a long time. It can be years, time, knowledge, opportunities, skills, or the acquisition of good habits. Often this is said about countries or their capitals after protracted wars, when they begin to rise from the ruins. What is the meaning of the phrase, and how do many journalists, writers and just educated people use it today?

Direct meaning

The expression "catch up" means replenishment of timely acquired experience, skills, etc. Thus, the word "catch up" itself can be replaced with a similar meaning "catch up". The phrase implies the application of great efforts on the part of the catching up side. Why? A simple example: runners do not start the same way from the same lane. They have an equal amount of strength, time and distance required to overcome. But what if someone fell? Then he will have to make up for the time he lost when he got up. And if an athlete missed training, then he will need to catch up with his rivals in strength, applyingmore effort.

Relationships between people

Everyone has a need to love and be loved. But often young men and women who did not receive their share of parental love in childhood may feel a lack of it as adults. There comes a time when they want to catch up.

Then they start chasing emotions: they can pour out their entire stock of feelings on their life partner. Someone is worried that he will hurt and upset his spouse, while someone, on the contrary, seeks to annoy, as his parents did in his childhood among themselves or in relation to himself. Such situations happen quite often, but for many it ends with the realization of the achievability of their goals and the coming to peace. Having caught up with what was deprived in childhood, a person returns to his rut. In such cases, the husband or wife, realizing that they have gone too far with feelings, stop aggressively catching up with the lack of love and continue a calm, peaceful relationship.

Catch up on lost years

During an armed conflict, both sides have to devote their energies to reproducing the resources needed to resolve their internal strife. After its end, as in the case, for example, with the Second World War, countries have to restore their economic, environmental, industrial, and demographic situation. It often takes decades. At the same time, journalists and writers habitually call the war itself"lost years" or "lost time" in the development of the state.

Thus, not only people can catch up, but also countries, institutions, nature after a long stagnation or a long process of destruction. This always implies the application of certain efforts, which will certainly be needed to catch up with others in a certain field of activity. The phrase itself means that everything will have to be done at a faster pace, how runners try to catch up with their rivals, how a person tries to fill the gap in his feelings that he missed once in childhood, how countries rise from the ashes in order to recover and prosper again.