On the Back Burner

This post was originally called sunburn, which would have been timely during the summer, but I’ve been very busy since then so I put this on the back burner, or I put it on hold, until now! We usually put a pot on the back burner of the stove when it needs little attention. So here’s the original post finally finished, on the front burner, getting the attention it deserves! Hopefully reading this will warm you up during the cold winter...

Oh no! It’s that burning sensation again! Nowadays, everybody is aware of the dangers of being exposed to the sun for too long without protection. Regardless, we still get sunburned. Bread that’s been left in the toaster too long can get burned to a crisp, hard and brittle. You should know better not to eat it. Unfortunately, we’re not careful about what we eat, so we can experience heartburn, even though it’s our stomach not our heart that’s really on fire. And if careless eating has added some unwanted pounds to your figure, you’ll have to exercise to burn off the calories.

If something burns up or burns down, it is destroyed by fire. Likewise, you can burn something up or down. Burn up is a more generally way of being consumed by fire, whereas burn down refers to a standing object collapsing as a result of fire. The protestors burned up an effigy of the president. The building was burned down to the ground. Burn down can also refer to a fire that is eventually extinguished. I woke up from the cold when the campfire burned down in the middle of the night. If a fire runs out of fuel, you can say it burns out. The forest fire finally burned out. We have to replace the light bulb that burned out.

Not surprisingly, both burn up and burn out are phrasal verbs with figurative meanings. If you get very angry, you get burned up, or make someone else very angry, you burn them up! Sometimes people can do a slow burn, when little by little, they get angrier and angrier. If you are tired of doing the same thing or are constantly exposed to something over a long period of time, you can burn out. It’s also easy to get tired if you burn the midnight oil, when you stay up very late working or studying (in the olden days, by the light of an oil lamp). It’s even worse if you burn a candle at both ends, when you make a habit of going to bed late and waking up early. It’s time to slow down.

On the other hand, when you want somebody or something very much, you burn for them. But don’t think you can impress them just because you have money to burn; having lots of money and spending it on unnecessary things. You must be careful not to get your fingers burned, like a kid playing with matches, by doing or saying something you shouldn’t have. Being insensitive will lead you to fail miserably, inevitably you will crash and burn, like a car hitting a wall and getting caught on fire. As a result of your bad behavior or bad decisions, you will have burned your bridges; ending a relationship with no hopes of going back to the way it was before.

As the wise proverb says: If you play with fire, you get burned!