Buy up

Buy up

Here’s a phrasal verb for you: “buy up.”

This is not a phrasal verb you’ll use very much, but it’s good to know what it means. To buy something up is to buy large quantities of it. When you buy something up, you buy as much as you can—maybe even all that is available.

Remember the Twinkie ? We talked about that in Lesson 625. This is the famous yellow, submarine-shaped snack cake in the U.S. The owners of the Twinkie went bankrupt and, briefly, stopped making Twinkies. That led Twinkie fans to buy up all the supplies of Twinkies at the store.

“Buy up” is appropriate here for two reasons. First, individuals went to stores and bought all the Twinkies in the store. One person might buy ten, twenty boxes of them. Individual people bought lots of Twinkies, each of them, and some people wanted to buy all the Twinkies in a store.

Not everyone was that crazy. Some people just wanted one last box. But the effect was, lots of people combined to buy the Twinkies, and the Twinkies ran out .

So those are two ways to use it. One individual buyer buys all that’s available. Or people combine to buy small quantities until it runs out.

Extreme weather events are examples where people buy up supplies in a store. When a hurricane is about to hit, homeowners will buy up all the water jugs that are available in the stores. When a snowstorm is about to hit, homeowners will buy up all the snow shovels.

One person doesn’t buy every shovel; one person only needs one or two shovels. But lots of people go and, when you add them all together, they buy up all the shovels that are in the store.

Early in the COVID pandemic, there was panic buying. People bought up all the supplies of water, toilet paper, paper towels, things like that. I remember seeing one woman at a grocery store with two shopping carts full of paper goods and frozen meat and a panicked look on her face. She was buying up all she could.

Speaking of health crises, there has been an alarming increase in dengue fever in Latin America. And there’s a new vaccine that’s said to be effective against dengue—but there aren’t many doses. Brazil has bought up a lot of doses of that vaccine: maybe not all that exist, but a lot of doses for its large population.

Remember non-fungible tokens ? If you don’t remember—well, these were—these are, they still exist—these are digital goods, like images, that belong to a person. The images can be copied a hundred, a thousand, a million times. But the NFT, the non-fungible token, is proof that one person “owns” the picture, even if there are many copies.

This was all the rage back in 2021 and 2022. We talked about it in Lesson 352. Anyway, celebrities would create NFT’s and people would buy them up. They wanted to be part of the action. The NFT’s sold out; people bought them up.

The NBA, the basketball league, issued NFT’s of popular video clips. Banksy, an artist, issued NFT’s of his work. And there were collections of NFT’s—again, if you want to understand the logic, you are going to be disappointed. There is no logic; it made no sense. But still, people bought them up. They bought them in large quantities until they had sold out.

Any big concert fans out there—besides JR? What happens when an artist releases tickets to a new concert series? Ticket brokers buy up all the tickets. Then, they put them on sale for a higher price. Ticket brokers buy up all the tickets: they buy large quantities, as many as they can get, and in hours (minutes, sometimes), all the tickets are gone.

Any sneakerheads out there? I’m not one—this is a world I know very little about. But when there are new sneaker releases, collectors and dealers and superfans buy up as many as they can. There are resale websites just like for concert tickets. Who knew.

See you next time!

That’s all for today. Great job finishing another Plain English audio lesson. Remember that the fun continues online, where you get to practice using “buy up” and get direct feedback from me. Plus, there are quizzes, listening exercises, pronunciation exercises, translations, and much more. That’s all at PlainEnglish.com/680.

We’ll be back on Thursday—another art episode. How about that, two weeks in a row, we’re talking about art on Plain English. On Thursday, where was the Mona Lisa painted? One geologist—yes, geologist—says she has the answer.

See you back here on Thursday for that one.