Reader question:

Please explain “stay put” in this sentence: They’re put to work young, and they stay put.

My comments:

“Stay put” here implies these people keep working on the same jobs.

Sounds like the olden days.

Back in the olden days here, before the reform took place in the late 1970s, young people, when they graduated from school (if there luckily were schools for them to graduate from, that is), they were given jobs by a State-owned company – all companies in those days were State-owned and so I could be accused of being wordy again – and they would stay on the job till they dropped, i.e. for ever.

It was called an iron rice bowl job, meaning they would have it for life.

That is, they would not be hopping jobs and moving from city to city as youngsters do today. Not on their own terms at any rate – back in the day, if people did move to another city, they would’ve been sent there, as just another assignment by the company.

Anyways, understand “put” in “stay put” as the past participle form of the word “put”, meaning being placed in a certain place to remain. If you, for example, after a little sword play, put the sword back into the box, it’ll stay put in the box. That is, it’ll stay in that fixed position till 2012 if neither you nor anyone else pull it out again before then.

Oh, 2012 reminds me of the movie of the same title currently making rounds in town. Quite a few people became worried, albeit perhaps not always sincerely, about the so-called end-of-the-world scenarios told in the movie.

“Do you believe the world will come to a close in 2012,” I was asked the other day, “as predicted by the ancient Maya people?”

Just to show that I have little respect for Hollywood, I solemnly declared my position – usually, you know, I would keep my position on a grave matter like this to my self. “My position is: The world will come to a close, but not in 2012 – Mayas – may they all rest in peace – aside, the world simply will not be influenced by a Hollywood movie.”

I’m sitting tight and staying put. In other words, I’m not committing suicide or financing a trip to the mars.

Anyways, “stay put” simply means to stay where one is, in the same place and not moving, and this awkward sounding phrase to the Chinese ear has been in the English language since the first half of the 1800s, according to the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms.

Here’s a recent media example:

A steady flow of new immigrants is providing a late-decade population boost to major metropolitan areas such as Chicago, Miami, New York and Los Angeles, whose states are seeking to stem declines before the 2010 census.

Even with a recent dip in immigration, the addition of foreign migrants into those major cities most attractive to them has cushioned substantial population losses from native-born Americans who had migrated to interior parts of the U.S. in search of jobs, wider spaces and affordable housing before the recession.

Now that many U.S. residents are staying put in large cities due to a housing crunch, California, Illinois and New York each are on track to avert a loss of at least one House seat. Florida could add one or two seats to its delegation depending on how much recent mortgage foreclosures have erased earlier population gains.

“From all that we have been seeing, there is a definite slowdown in the migration trends that had put these states at risk,” said Kimball Brace, president of Election Data Services, a Virginia-based firm that crunches political numbers. Those states have “been given a grace of God.”

Still, noting that many of the population numbers remain in flux, Brace cautioned: “A whole congressional seat can change at the drop of the hat.”

An analysis by the Brookings Institution think tank finds immigration is buoying many of the nation’s larger cities. New York and Los Angeles picked up 1.1 million and 815,000 immigrants since 2000, respectively, and together account for one-fourth of the foreign-born arrivals. That lessened the impact of an exodus of 1.8 million residents from New York and 1.2 million from Los Angeles.

Chicago, Washington and Miami have been hurt by overbuilding and foreclosures in parts of their metro regions, but last year they reversed trends from earlier in the decade and posted increases in immigrants that more than offset losses in native-born Americans.

In all, 20 out of the 40 largest metropolitan areas sustained losses in American-born residents from 2000 to 2008, including Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco, according to the Brookings study being released Wednesday. But in 15 of those 20 metro areas, immigration made up for at least half of the associated population loss.

- Population shifts could boost Calif, NY in census, AP, December 9, 2009.

本文僅代表作者本人觀點，與本網立場無關。歡迎大家討論學術問題，尊重他人，禁止人身攻擊和發布一切違反國家現行法律法規的內容。

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

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（作者張欣 中國日報網英語點津 編輯陳丹妮）