Make up for
Today’s expression is a phrasal verb: to make up for. This is going to be fun for me to try to explain what it means to make up for something. It’s a little tricky to explain.
Think about a situation where something good happens to take the place of something bad. That’s how I used it before. I said that hotels rely on business travel, leisure travel, and large conventions and meetings to survive. If business travel is light, they can try to lure more leisure travelers, for example. If business travel is down—if that’s bad—then they can make up for it with more leisure travelers.
They make up for the decrease in business travelers with an increase in leisure travelers. They can replace those lost business travelers with vacationers.
Many kinds of businesses are diverse, they sell various things. If they suffer a loss in one division, they can make up for it with a gain in another division. We can do this in our personal budgets, too. I don’t know if you do this, but I make a budget at the beginning of the year. It’s impossible to know what I’ll spend, but I try to guess. If I spend more than I think in one area, I can make up for it by spending less in another area.
When we say “make up for” we often talk about a balancing effect. Something bad happens, but in return, or in response, we balance it out with something good. It rained last night and we had to cancel our barbeque. That’s okay; we’ll make up for it by going to the movies tomorrow. One thing was canceled—we made up for it by doing something different, something equally fun.
A sports team might suffer an embarrassing loss one day. The next time they take the field, they’ll want to make up for that loss with a strong performance. In baseball, pitchers tend to be able to throw really fast early in their careers. As they get older, they can’t throw as hard. But they make up for it by throwing different styles of pitches and putting more movement on the ball. A younger pitcher can just throw it hard and straight. That’s not possible forever. That same pitcher in seven or eight years can make up for the loss in velocity with better control or different styles of pitches.
Imagine a wedding—I’ve never planned a wedding, but I’ve attended quite a few. It’s rare for everything in a wedding to go perfectly, right? But if something goes wrong, hopefully something else makes up for it. Maybe the event ran out of chairs, so some people had to stand. But the band was excellent, so that made up for it. People didn’t want to be sitting down anyway, since the band was so good.
That actually happened to me. I was at a wedding and they ran out of chairs at the tables. So I volunteered with one of my friends to stand up for part of the time so others could sit. It’s okay though. We made up for it by standing right next to the open bar!
Sometimes if you do something wrong, you need to make up for it by doing something extra-special good. If you forget to wish your wife a happy birthday or happy anniversary, you might have to make up for it by bringing flowers or cooking dinner for a full week. If you over-charge a customer, you have to make up for it by giving a refund and sending something for free. If you spill a drink on someone at a restaurant or a bar, you should make up for it by buying at least one round for the person you spilled on, in addition to offering to paying for a dry-cleaning bill.
JR’s song of the week
Today’s song of the week is “In Your Eyes” by The Weeknd. It talks about the artist’s on-again-off-again relationship with the model Bella Hadid. The lyrics betray a sense of regret and internal turmoil the artist faces over that relationship. “In Your Eyes” by The Weeknd is the song of the week. You can always find your song of the week by searching “Plain English Playlist” on Spotify.
See you next time!
That’s all today; remember, we’ll continue the topic on Monday to see how offices, warehouses, and apartments might change after COVID. In the meantime, if you speak Turkish or Polish, remember that you have a whole new way to experience Plain English with our instant translations. Those are available to Starter and Plus members; you can pick your plan and start enjoying those translations today by visiting PlainEnglish.com/join.
Use realistic expressions like a native speaker
