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Mfholic Posted 20 years ago
Grammar

catch up on

Finally, it’s not enough to do all this if you tell people to delete things out of turn. Just ask anyone who use to work for Arthur Andersen. Or ask Frank Quattrone, the former Credit Suisse First Boston banker who spent three years fighting obstruction-of-justice charges after he forwarded the document retention policy to other employees and instructed them to “catch up on file cleaning”­—this when the company was going to be under investigation. (Charges were dropped last month.)



question: catch up on = hurry up on?
  

Top answer

If you "catch up on" something, you are getting yourself up to date, clearing out a backlog, etc. If you've been away for a few days and come back to find 150 e-mails in your inbox, and you sit down and go through them all, you are "catching up" on your e-mail. So in a sense, you may "hurry up" but only to get yourself where you are supposed to be.

— BarbaraPA

  • If you "catch up on" something, you are getting yourself up to date, clearing out a backlog, etc.
  • If you've been away for a few days and come back to find 150 e-mails in your inbox, and you sit down and go through them all, you are "catching up" on your e-mail.
  • So in a sense, you may "hurry up" but only to get yourself where you are supposed to be.
  • " In this case, employees should have been deleting files according to the retention policy, but they did not.
  • When he said "get caught up" he was saying that they should delete them, quickly.
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3 Answers
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If you "catch up on" something, you are getting yourself up to date, clearing out a backlog, etc. If you've been away for a few days and come back to find 150 e-mails in your inbox, and you sit down and go through them all, you are "catching up" on your e-mail. So in a sense, you may "hurry up" but only to get yourself where you are supposed to be.

In a literal sense, if you are walking
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Whats the difference between "But since they were already under investigation, he should have known that additional deletion was - if not illegal - not an appropriate thing to be doing." and "But since they were already under investigation, he should have known that additional deletion was - if not illegal - not an appropriate thing to do. ?"
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Basically they mean the same in this context. But when you say something is 'to be doing', it implies that this thing has not been done yet. Whereas something 'to do' simply depicts a fact.
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