Pay up
Today I’m going to show you how to use the phrasal verb “pay up.” It’s a variation on the word “pay.” You can pay for lunch, you can pay for a car, you can pay for a house, you can pay your rent or your mortgage on the first of the month.
But “pay up” means to pay a debt in full, usually if it’s difficult or if you don’t want to do it. “Pay up” is what we say when you’ve accumulated a debt, and eventually you have to pay the full balance.
Imagine you have a poker game with friends. At the beginning of the night, you all decide to buy in for $20. At the beginning of the night, you don’t take the money out of your wallets. You just divide the chips and you’ll settle the bets later.
So imagine that one player at the table loses all his chips—he’s out of the game. The other players continue, and eventually it gets late and you decide to go home. Anyone who lost chips has to pay up. They have to settle their debt. The one player who lost all his chips has to pay $20. The time comes to pay up.
This is nice, right? Nobody likes to lose $20, but it’s not too much, and we’re all among friends, and of course the losers will pay up at the end of the night and the winners will go home just a little richer.
That’s not how it works on a futures exchange , as you learned today. On a futures exchange, the “players” bet big amounts of money. You can win big on a futures exchange, and you can lose big. And guess what: the exchanges don’t trust their customers to pay up when they lose. It’s not like your friendly poker game, where you can just pay up–pay your debt–at the end of the night. On a big exchange, you have to post collateral to cover your losses, and you have to do that before the game starts.
A long time ago—and this is not something I’m proud of—but a long time ago, I accumulated a lot of unpaid parking tickets. I lived on a street where they closed one side of the street occasionally, but they never told you when they were going to do it. So I wouldn’t know when they were going to close the street, and I’d get a ticket because I didn’t move my car. Because I didn’t know! And I didn’t pay the tickets right away, out of anger, frustration, and lack of money. Naively, I think I hoped the city would just forget about it.
Well. Unlike FTX, the city of Chicago kept meticulous accounting records and they knew exactly how much I owed in parking tickets. And they sent me a note (and not a nice note, either) saying I had to pay up or…the next time they saw my car on the street, they would just tow it away and keep it.
The time had come to pay up. I had to pay my debt in full. I didn’t want to. But when the city threatened to impound my car, well, I decided to pay up. I decided to pay my full debt. And eventually I got an apartment with a garage!
Big companies face lawsuits all the time. And they defend themselves, they pay expensive lawyers to help them avoid losing judgments in lawsuits. For the last twelve years, Google has been facing a lawsuit from California residents, who say the company misused their personal data. And for twelve years, Google has avoided paying. But, the company recently decided to pay up. Instead of going to trial, they reached an agreement with the plaintiffs, and Google will be paying up. Like me with my parking tickets, they probably aren’t going to enjoy paying the money. But they determined that they had to—so they will be paying up.
Quote of the Week
We’re going to race through the quote of the week, since this is already a long lesson. Here we go, from George Orwell: “An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”
So if you’re reading an autobiography, you should only trust it if the author discloses all the bad stuff about himself or herself. Otherwise, you can’t trust it. Because, Orwell says, the whole truth about everyone includes some of the bad stuff. So that’s today’s quote. “An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”
See you next time!
You know you can trust Plain English because I tell you the disgraceful stuff—my parking tickets!
Well that’s all for today’s lesson. This had a lot of complicated vocabulary in it, “post collateral”, “settle a bet”, stuff like that. So if you think a transcript would be helpful, just visit PlainEnglish.com/542. The transcript is free, just read it as you listen and I bet you’ll pick up a few new words if you do that.
Coming up on Thursday: what happens when a cemetery is full? A shortage of burial sites is causing grave concern in the world’s biggest and most congested cities. That’s on Thursday. See you then!
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