There he was, lying on the side of the road half-dead. “No need to get all up in the air about it,” said everyone except the Samaritan.
Both the italicized expressions are used in Luke–the first in the story of the good Samaritan, the second in Jesus’s teaching concerning anxiety.
The thugs in the parable of the good Samaritan leave the victim ἡμιθανῆ (Luke 10:30; lexical form: ἡμιθανής). The prefix ἡμι– denotes “half” (cf. ἥμισυς, noun, “half”); –θανής is related to the common word θνῄσκω, “to die.” We generally use the expression “half-dead” hyperbolically, meaning “really tired,” but once could use the expression to say “severely injured,” as it’s used in Luke.
In Luke’s version of Jesus’s “don’t worry” sayings (Luke 12:22-31 // Matthew 6:25-33), Jesus says μὴ μετεωρίζεσθε. The verb μετεωρίζομαι means “to be lifted up, elevated” (BDAG), but in this context it means, metaphorically, “to be anxious, worried.” Bauer notes, “compare our ‘be up in the air’ about something.”
Brian W. Davidson 