What is this called?

Question

What is it called when someone says "What's up?" which actually means "How are you doing?" and not literally "What is up?".

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

I cannot answer your question, but I wanted to share this true story with you:

One time a senior citizen ( = old person) went to a store to buy something. The young man working there said to him:

What's up?

The senior did not understand what the young man meant, so the old man looked up into the air!

That is a true story. Really!

LouiST · Answer

Actually 'What's up' means 'What are you doing? / What are you up to?'.
That's at least how we teenager use it.

Regards · Answer

Hi,

Anonymous What is it called when someone says "What's up?" which actually means "How are you doing?" and not literally "What is up?"

In a word, idiomatic English.

In this case, it is just an informal way of using the word up. I wouldn't call this an idiom, but it is idiomatic

(natural to the native speaker). By the way, in What's up? up usually means happening, going on,

so it should be easy to define if you are already familiar with this word.

Also, you are quite wrong: it doesn't specifically mean How are you doing? Usually, it just means What's new?

Regards

CalifJim · Answer

Anonymous What is it called when someone says "What's up?" which actually means "How are you doing?" and not literally "What is up?".

Any language that is not literal is figurative. This may be considered the figure of speech called a metaphor. Metaphor occurs when speaker meaning differs from word meaning. In this case the words form a fixed idiom for which native speakers no longer think of the literal meaning, so it's called a "dead metaphor".

CJ

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