Prepositions

Do you put things up or do you put things down?

Thirty years in the monastery trained me to put things up. A place for everything and everything in its place. The fact that the initials the Disclaced Carmelites put after their names were OCD (the initials for the Latin name of the Order), which can also mean obsessive-compulsive disorder, may not be an accident.

Thirty years of marriage and a houseful of kids taught Tom to put things down. When he is interrupted while reading a book, he just puts it down wherever he happens to be so he can deal with the latest crisis. When he wants it, he'll find it again -- sooner or later. He sees no reason to put away the iron and ironing board because -- hey! -- he'll eventually iron some more shirts. The list could go on, and he would assure you that I recite it to him with some regularity. (The kitchen is the particular sore point, although we are making progress. Not perfection, just progress.)

One reason I put things up is that I tend to forget where I put things down. Yesterday several of us spent a half hour trying to locate a pricing gun that I put down (instead of up) when I had to go answer the phone and then got distracted by other tasks before getting back to what I had been doing. It was indeed where I had put it, but because it looked like part of the lathe on which I had carefully set it, four of us looked right at it several times before I finally saw it from the right angle to recognize it.

Anyway, up or down?