Please help me about this sentence

[ntmhoang18]

Hi everyone. I have a grammar question relating to a sentence in my Idioms book. The sentence is " One day he came into work looking like death warmed up and so we told him to go away for a few days to recharge his batteries" I don't know if the "looking like death warmed up" part is a restrictive adverbial participle phrase or not. Please help!

[englishhobby]

I am a Non-NEST (Non-Native English-Speaking Teacher)



If you google it for "restrictive adverbial participle phrase" (using inverted commas), you'll be suprised to find that yours is the only result in the world wide web. ))

[MikeNewYork]

Hi everyone. I have a grammar question relating to a sentence in my Idioms book. The sentence is " One day he came into work looking like death warmed up and so we told him to go away for a few days to recharge his batteries" I don't know if the "looking like death warmed up" part is a restrictive adverbial participle phrase or not. Please help!

What does "restrictive adverbial participle phrase" mean to you?

[Barb_D]

Regarding the idiom, I know it as "death warmed over." Do you know it as "death warmed up"?

[MikeNewYork]

Regarding the idiom, I know it as "death warmed over." Do you know it as "death warmed up"?

The latter form is BrE usage.

[emsr2d2]

Regarding the idiom, I know it as "death warmed over." Do you know it as "death warmed up"?

The BrE usage isn't reserved for this idiom. We don't "warm food over", we "warm it up". The opposite is "cool it down".

[MikeNewYork]

The BrE usage isn't reserved for this idiom. We don't "warm food over", we "warm it up". The opposite is "cool it down".

Same in AmE, but neither of us actually warms "death" in any way.

[Barb_D]

Right. We warm up everything else (including ourselves - "Brr! Let's go inside and warm up!") but it's "you look like death warmed over" in my experience. I was wondering if it was local to the northeast, or largely US, but now I know it's clearly not British.

[Rover_KE]

Welcome to the forum, ntmhoang.

Your first question proved to be an interesting one, but please note that a better title would have been Looking like death warmed up.

Extract from the Posting Guidelines:

'Thread titles should include all or part of the word/phrase being discussed.'

I'm wondering why you need to find a label such as 'a restrictive adverbial participle phrase' for it.