Obama said "gin up about the prospect of rallying behind whoever emerges from this process". Did he misspeak? [closed]

No, he didn’t misspeak. He merely took a colloquial expression normally used transitively and roped it into an intransitive use so that he could have two balanced, parallel expressions that worked the same away on both sides.

Chill out is used intransitively, so he needed to also have something similarly intransitive to oppose it with. And it needs to be in the same colloquial register to maintain the parallelism. So what’s he supposed to do here?

It’s easy to find colloquial synonyms for chill out in the sense of relax, like calm down, simmer down, loosen up, hang loose, and so on and so forth. So what’s the opposite of relaxing or getting/becoming relaxed? Certainly one obvious answer is becoming excited, but that one is no good as foil to chill out.

So he used gin up, which is a perfectly fine colloquialism from the same register as that of chill out. But here’s the thing: normally gin up, gin out, gin together are used transitively with a separable object. But he needed it to be intransitive so that gin up about the prospects could balance against chill out about the candidates.

What else was he supposed to use? He couldn’t have used awaken about because it’s got the wrong register. Sure, maybe he could have used get fired up about, but that needs an extra word compared with chill out about or gin up about. I guess fire up or rev up might have been possible, but they’re not quite so colloquial as chilling out and ginning up are.

In sum, he deliberately chose a balanced pair of matching colloquial expressions. What’s bothering you is that to do this, he had to use the second one intransitively so it could match the first one’s intransitivity, but he chose one that is rarely used intransitively. That’s why it grates upon your ear.

However, he’s a native speaker so he gets to do that sort of thing if it pleases him to do so. Moreover, he’s one who is renowned for his deliberate and measured tone coupled with his folksy delivery. So it isn’t a case of him misspeaking. Rather, he’s exercising his inherent native-speaker licence to freely invent novel approaches in how he uses his own language whenever it serves him to do so. Which here it clearly did.