1

It's from movie scene and there are those dialogues.

'This used to be A Appliance Manufacturing. This sits on a 14-acre lot. This floor alone, 20,000 square feet. It could easily be converted into an industrial space, even have an eight-car tow up.' And that's the all dialogues related.

In this sentence, 'It' means a big building and I wonder what 'an eight-car tow up' means. Please let me know what it means.

Thank you!

Improve this question
4
  • Please don't quote a line of text without giving the source. Ideally you could link to the webpage with the source. If not please give enough context. "Big building" is not enough. Perhaps there is something special about this building that is obvious if we can see the whole source.
    – James K
    Jun 25, 2019 at 7:03
  • Thank you for replying and sorry that I can't open the source but I will add more sentences.//// It's a part of movie scene and there are those dialogues. 'This used to be A Appliance Manufacturing. This sits on a 14-acre lot. This floor alone, 20,000 square feet. It could easily be converted into an industrial space, even have an eight-car tow up.' And that's all dialogues related.
    – julialee
    Jun 25, 2019 at 7:07
  • "Its from a movie script". That is the missing piece of information.
    – James K
    Jun 25, 2019 at 7:13
  • What movie script? If those are individual pieces of dialogue, please use line breaks to indicate that. As written, it sounds like a single line of dialogue. (I had started to edit the question to use block quotes instead, but I couldn't figure out if it was all one quote or multiple quotes—or, if multiple quotes, if each sentence was its own quote.)
    – Jason Bassford
    Jun 25, 2019 at 15:27

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

As this is from a movie script, it isn't an actual expert talking, but a writer who is trying to sound like an actual expert, and some things are wrong.

I think that here the writer is confusing the hydraulic lifts that a vehicle repair shop will have to raise cars when fixing the underside, with the idea of towing cars to the garage, and has coined the unidiomatic phrase "tow-up".

The image that is probably intended is "space to work on 8 cars at the same time" so you could have a pretty big and busy repair shop in that space.

The phrase would be "8-car tow-up" (not cars), and there are other forms of unidiomatic expression in the quote, (Such as "'This' sits on..." which suggest to me that either you have misquoted, or the writer was not a native English speaker.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .