In the endless ads online for Temu, for fathers day they are peddling t-shirts with sayings, and one of them goes:
“I Love My Wife but sometimes I want to square up.”
I looked it up for a definition, still don’t get it? What does this mean?
Square up for a fight or even the score. Still doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I think “square up” makes sense in the context of a fight. “I love her even though sometimes there’s conflict between us.”
One would hope the wearer of the shirt is simply talking about arguments, but there’s a physicality to the expression “square up” that a lot of folks would object to.
It’s about fighting. You can get the same shirt about your husband as well.
I agree with these interpretations (as my skin crawls).
But why would you? Perhaps it explains why they don’t get along. I don’t think my wife would appreciate such a shirt (and I don’t know why she would buy it for me. She buys all my t-shirts).
Weird. I don’t get it either. I googled it, and apparently such shirts are for sale at various sites (only with the wording “wanna” instead of “want to”), including Etsy, Amazon, and Walmart, but nowhere did I see an explanation (or any customer comments or ratings).
My WAG is that it’s an instance of Engrish: either a bad translation of something that made more sense in the original language, or an attempt by someone with a weak grasp of the English language to come up with something that sounds clever.
Just Redneck English. I understood it.
What’s hard to get? “I love my wife, but sometimes I want to fight her.”
It’s one more in a long line of dumb trashy t-shirts aimed at the, uh less discerning market, typically seen on People of Walmart type sites.
Sonya Deville, a woman wrestler used the catch-phrase “Put your hair up and square up”.
Nah, there’s a subset of the population that gets off on conflict. I dated a woman years ago who said she didn’t think the relationship was “healthy” unless we were open about our disagreements, which sounds good, but it translated into her picking a fight on a weekly basis if we hadn’t already had one. She would have bought this shirt immediately. (And before you ask, no, I didn’t date her very long, because it was stupid and exhausting.)
I don’t know why you’d want to advertise your emotional dysfunction on a t-shirt, but evidently there’s a market.
I was unfamiliar with the phrase “square up,” at least in that context. I thought it meant to make things even, either literally (as in aligning the corners of a stack of paper) or figuratively (as in paying a debt).
The phrase is “square off” in terms of preparing to fight a person. Engrish as pointed out by @Thudlow_Boink .
I guess it’s supposed to be some sort of modernized version of the “I love you Alice, but one of these days, to the moon”.
Or maybe some macho form of I love my wife but instead of verbally sparing with her I would rather just settle it physically?
“Square off” has the connotation of two people facing one another, both preparing to fight.
“Square up” has the connotation of one person assuming a fight-ready posture regardless of what the other person is doing.
That’s the way I’ve heard it, anyway.
Closer to “I love my wife, but sometimes I want to punch her.” Squaring up or squaring off against someone means physically fighting, not verbally.
I think this is a “to each their own” situation.
Actually it mean getting ready for a physical fight, but if actual fighting starts it’s past the square up/off phase. I think it’s playing the line between a figurative meaning and a literal one.
To me, “square up” brings thoughts of settling a debt or paying one’s fair share. Still doesn’t make sense in the context of the sentence, though. I guess we really can say “forget about it; it’s Chinatown”.