I'm reading some Sherlock Holmes stories (don't judge - it's good vacation reading) and Conan Doyle has Holmes saying things like "Sorry to knock you up, Watson..." which I'm finding very... odd. From the context I'm gathering that it means "wake up," but my head immediately goes to the modern American meaning of "impregnate."
Is "knock up" ever used with this meaning anymore? And if not, did it disappear around the time that the pregnancy meaning became common, or did it vanish on its own?
The Google n-grams viewer suggests that the “impregnate” sense became dominant in the US around the 1940’s, but that in British English, other meanings were more common until at least the 1990’s.
This is based on comparing the relative frequencies of knocked her up vs. knocked him up. It seems reasonable to conclude that when the “impregnate” meaning becomes dominant, knocked her up should become much more frequent than knocked him up. The results for this in the “American English” corpus show this shift happening between the ’30s and ’60s, since which time knocked him up has been much less common:
(The predominance of knocked him up in earlier years presumably just due to the preponderance of male characters in general.) As one would expect, the British English corpus shows a very different pattern, with no such notable switch:
It looks like knocked her up may have been becoming predominant in British English in the ’90s, but this is such a small interval of the data that I’m not sure how much significance one can attach to it.
This is a difference between American and British English. In England if you knock someone up you get them out of bed. In America you usually have to get them into bed to knock them up (unless you're both in high school, in which case you will have to tilt the seat back in your parents' car). And by "them" I mean women only, because it's still the case that only women can get pregnant. But you can knock up anybody you want in Britain — how awesome is that?
Knock up is 1660s in sense of "arouse by knocking at the door;" however it is little used in this sense in Amer.Eng., where the phrase means "get a woman pregnant" (1813)....
So I guess it's a safe bet that, by the early-mid-1800s, knock up lacked the "wake up" meaning in the States. Google Books and the BYU corpora are your friends, though, if you want to look for specific dates of usage.
Update: Another answer, q.v., has examined Google Books, with the result that my guessed safe bet was a bad guess after all.
I heard a Scottish friend of ours ask someone if they could "knock up some brownies" the other day. Of course, she wanted them to bake a batch of brownies, but ... I'm in Canada, and everyone else (including me) started giggling like schoolchildren, and the expression on her face when she figured out what she'd just said was priceless.
So, this was a rather long-winded way of saying that I think it doesn't actually mean pregnant in the UK, or at least, that's a less common meaning than the other ones.
Used in the "wake up" sense in New Zealand until the 1970s. Knocker upper was a profession in Victorian England before alarm clocks. See Dickens' Hindle Wakes. Another example of TV pollution of the language by "yanks" — like stick shift for "gear lever" and SUV for "4×4".
I'm British. We used the term knocked up frequently when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's to mean a girl who had gotten pregnant. I am told that it is derived from the term prima nocta, a medieval lord's right to bed his serf's virgin daughters, but this may be apocryphal. The older generation used the term to mean wake someone up; don't know when the meaning switched but even when we were watching comedy shows in the 70's, e.g., Are You Being Served, this was one of the funny nudge nudge wink wink lines.
Is "knock up" ever used with this meaning anymore? And if not, did it disappear around the time that the pregnancy meaning became common, or did it vanish on its own?
The semantic factor is apparent, writes the linguist, Leonard Bloomfield,in the disfavoring of speech-forms that are homonymous with tabu-forms. ... In America, knocked up is a tabu- form for "rendered pregnant"; for this reason, the phrase is not used in the British sense "tired, exhausted." In older French and English there was a word, French con- nil, connin, English coney, for "rabbit"; in both lan- guages this word died out because it resembled a word / that was undera_ tabu ofindecency. For the same reason, ( rooster and donkey are replacing cock and ass in Ameri- can English. In such cases there is little real ambiguity, but some hearers react nevertheless to the powerful stimulus of the tabu-word; having called forth ridicule or embarrassment, the speaker avoids the innocent homo- r nym. It is a remarkable fact that the tabu-word itself has a much tougher life than the harmless homonym.12 Yes, good words fall into disrepute, while the tabooed words are tough and resistant. -The anatomy of dirty words. . Sagarin, Edward, (1962)
