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If our paths don’t cross before the year is out, then I wish you all well in the run up to the festivities to come.
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1. year is out in the above sentence means the year of 2012 is gone, am I right?
2. What does it mean of paths don’t cross & run up in the above sentence,
please?
Thank you.
1. Yes.
2. If our paths cross then we will meet again. The "run up" is the time of preparation before the festivities.
A bit of extra vocab. on the subject of years being out. I feel that expressions of time being finished are more often 'up', especilly in expressions like 'Your time's up' (which students may have heard at the end of an exam:-)).
But there is a tradition (perhaps Anglo-Saxon) of ringing church bells to mark the end of the year. Associated with this, there is the expression 'Ring out the old year, ring in the new'. I suspect (just my supposition) that the use of 'out' in collocation with 'year' may owe something to this tradition.
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