Talk:zip

Does anyone know whether this verb is ergative? Does the following sentence make sense in English: I zipped my pants, therefore my pants zipped?


 * It doesn’t make sense to me as American English, but it would make sense to write this: "My pants zip up, so I zipped them up". —Stephen 20:13, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Thank you :-) That sounds like two different senses.  In "My pants zip up, so I zipped them up", the first part "My pants zip up" seems to mean "My pants are equipped with a zipper, they have the ability for someone to zip them".  Whereas of course the second part means the physical action.  Here's a better question.  Say you're writing a novel and the hero's pants mysteriously get zipped up magically without anyone touching the zipper.  Would it make sense to write "His pants mysteriously zipped up", or would you have to write "Something mysteriously zipped his pants up"?

Missing possibly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zips --75.71.17.28 00:41, 14 May 2018 (UTC)

Churchill Quote
After we had dressed for dinner--my zip hardly takes a minute to put on-- ... - Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 4, The Hinge of Fate, Chapter 29. what exactly is he referring to? Eroica (talk) 11:01, 9 June 2018 (UTC)

Zip > ciph > cypher > sifr (Arabic "zero")?
The etymology section doesn't mention that ciph was a relatively common word for the number zero in English until the late 19th century. Shakespeare often uses it, and Jane Austen does so in "Mansfield Park" (cypher only evolved to mean code around that time). Many European languages still have related words meaning digit (German Ziffer, Polish cyfra etc). Someone just using a common word for the number zero to mean zero seems more plausible than just claiming it to be onomatopoetic, as we do in etymology 1, no.4: Zip. (slang) Zero; nothing; I know zip about economics. Renerpho (talk) 23:55, 4 July 2024 (UTC)