By mistake I wrote somewhere to a friend : “Keep up the good Job”, then I was told that it’s wrong and the standard format is Keep up the good work. Next, with a little search I came to this point that if I had added “with” before “the good Job” it could have sound correct; " Keep up with the good job".
1- Is “keep up the good Job” is totally wrong? if it is spoken, the speaker would sound weird, slightly incorrect, an egregious mistake, or … what?
2- How about " Keep up with the good job"?
Thanks.
“Keep up the good work” is the standard phrase. “Job” may mean the same as “work” (at least in most contexts), but “keep up the good job” not the standard way of phrasing this. I guess that I would say that “keep up the good work” is an idiom. That is, it’s one of those cases where when learning a language, you have to learn that a phrase means something slightly different from what you’d expect given the words within the phrase. I presume that you’re not a native speaker of English. “Keep up the good work” is, unfortunately, one more of those English idioms you need to learn.
My crystal ball says this may be one of those cases where something which your native language would use a single word for two related-but-different concepts uses two words in English. It’s the case for me: trabajo means both “work” and “job”, there are other words for “job” but they sound more highbrow, in some ways they’re more akin to “employment” than to “job”.
On one hand, nobody would misunderstand what you mean,
on the other hand, yeah, the collocation or idiom is what it is and either you remember it or you don’t,
and on both feet, it’s not exactly an uncommon problem for ESL speakers and happens sometimes for EFL ones. So long as you’re understood, whatever.
Another formulation that would work: “You’re doing a great job, keep it up.”
One is your employment: “I lost my job.”
The other is a limited task or piece of work. “You did a good job cleaning your room, Son.”
Neither works well in your suggestions. Of course, it’s oversimplifying, and doesn’t quite explain why Nava’s suggestion is a good one.
In any case, this is the kind of thing where, in a spy movie, you’d be detected as a foreigner and shot (even if you weren’t actually a foreigner, thickening the plot because the real spy goes on unnoticed, but you’re still dead. Enjoy!)
However, 2 is much more clumsy. It actually seems like it might be saying something else. “Keep up with” means “Try to be equal with,” as in “I’m trying to keep up with Sarah, but she is running too fast.”
In the USA particularly, the masses tend to lead, and not follow, standard usage.
“Keep up the good job” is different enough from our standard idiom to suggest the user might have English as a second language but constructed well enough to also suggest the user is still precise and well-educated.
I am always impressed at ESL (English as a Second Language) folks who try to put better fences around our use of English than we native users do ourselves.
I do understand that “Keep up the good work” is much more commonly heard in U.S. than the the same sentence with “job.” However I don’t think I’d even notice the difference in usage, let alone suspect that English was a second language. (Australians with English as first language say things that sound far more non-idiomatic to me.) Even if non-idiomatic, it’s not at all wrong, let alone “totally wrong.”
(Disclaimer: Native English speakers are rarish where I live, so I’m out of practice Sometimes I have trouble speaking “idiomatically” these days. :smack: )
Of course it’s totally wrong, but only because you capitalized job. Job lost all his cattle, his wife, and all his children. You don’t want to imply that sort of disaster should beset anyone you’re praising.
Sure. “Good job!!” I hear but NOT “keep up the good job.” I’ve never heard that from a native speaker anywhere in America, sounds completely wrong and very foreign to me.
Currently live in NYC, also have lived in rural VA & college-town MI.
“Keep up the good job” doesn’t sound weird to my Midwest ears. I think we’d preferentially use “work,” but job would be perfectly fine, and wouldn’t denote ESL except in conjunction with a non-English accent of some kind.
