Image from pixaby.com
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I was telling Mark and Jim about those deer I saw, the mamas, the ones that were blazing through the steep-sloped lawn of the Helen Purcell Home.
"They were running full tilt," I started.
"Full tilt?" said Jim.
"You know," I said, a little impatiently. "Pell mell."
Jim looked at me from under a perplexed eyebrow.
"Hell bent for leather," Mark interjected.
"Ah," said Jim, and his face cleared. "Like a bat out of hell.
And I realized at that moment how very many ways we the people have of saying, "…going really, really fast."
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Take full tilt, now. If I thought about the term's origins at all, I probably thought it meant going so fast that you were tilting toward the earth, head straining ahead of feet, trying to have any forward body part be the first thing over the finish line.
But no, phrases.org.uk tells me. I am wrong.
'Tilt' in this case doesn't mean incline. It was a synonym, ages ago, for jousting. (Remember Don Quixote tilting at windmills?)
So to run full tilt is to move as fast as two jousting knights, their lances leveled to take each other down, their horses streaming, unleashed, going just as fast as their strength and muscles pull them.
Another pixaby.com illustration...
Not, actually a bad metaphor for how those mama deer were running.
(And, just by the way, there's a thing called Full Tilt Poker[fulltilt.com], which is an online poker casino that originates in Ireland. It's probably NOT the kind of thing one wants to run at, full tilt.)
But there are other ways to say moving really fast, too.
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Pell mell, etymonline.com tells me, slipped into English from the French in the 1400's. It means, says the site, to move "…with indiscriminate violence, energy, or eagerness," and its French origin looked very similar: pele mele. (I imagine the word 'melee' shares the same source.)
Pell mell also shares roots with words like meddle; think of a meddler stirring things up, working things up to the explosion point, with no idea what will happen.
In my mind's eye, I see a person running pell mell down a steep hill. His hands are flailing; he's tripping, almost, over his own feet. He's yelling, too; just a kind of mess of movement, this pell mell guy. Before he gets to whatever his destination is,—if he even has a destination—he tumbles, and then he's rolling, faster and faster, bouncing on rocks and oof-ing over stumps of small trees, and it's a long time before the momentum wanes and he can gain control.
THAT'S what moving pell mell looks like.
(It's interesting. Etymonline offers a chart of pell mell's usage rates, from the early 1800's until now. The term was most popular in 1870 or so, and then its use declined steadily. UNTIL—the early 2000's, and it's been in growth mode ever since. Does that have something to do with the lack of thoughtfulness in our world today? Are we rushing somewhere, pell mell?)
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Hell bent for leather now—-that's a mash up from the 1800's American West, according to truewestmagazine.com. In those days, if one was hellbent, she was focused, ferociously, on some dubious goal—if she reached that goal, she could find herself in a whole heap of hurting. And to ride 'hell for leather' was to ride a horse...well, full tilt.
So the term's leather means a saddle, and the phrase conjures up blazing speed, and someone riding in this way could be very, very unhappy with the destination they finally reach.
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John Dos Passos was the first writer to publish the term 'bat out of hell,' I discover on idiomorigins.org. In his novel, The Three Soldiers, Dos Passos penned these words: "We went like a bat out of hell along a good state road."
It was World War One pilots who made the phrase popular, and it's easy to imagine why. Picture a pilot leaving the conflagration of battle,--emerging, as quickly as he can, from clouds of smoke, and heading back to the safety of a base. His wing may have suffered some damage. There may have been a gash in the tail or rudder of his fragile craft.
His flight, hurtling as fast as he could, might have looked erratic. We picture bats' flight as erratic, too, the highspeed flapping and circling. In reality, though, those bats are smart and know exactly where they're heading. Those pilots, did, too.
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I have some work to get done at home this weekend. It's actually fascinating work—involving reading applications from good people for what could be a life-changing award, and I don't mind the challenge at all. But, as with any task that involves a sheer volume of entries, I find myself circling around it rather than plunging right in.
"Shake a leg," I tell myself sternly, and then I wonder where THAT injunction to move more quickly came from. I find answers on English-grammar-lessons.com, which tells me the term originally, in the 1800's, referred to dancing. (Some folks might still, I guess, use, "Would you like to shake a leg?" as an invitation to dance.) Now though, it's generally kind of a funny way to tell someone to hurry up.
English-grammar-lessons.com pinpoints the change in meaning to 1904, when the New York Magazine explained the term like this: "Shake a leg…meaning to hurry up."
"Shake a leg" clipart from LessonPix.com
The site also proposes that modern-day terms like "Shake, rattle, and roll," and "Shake your bootie," are close cousins. Back to dance, mostly, though, with those guys…
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Here's one no one uses any more, but I love it: 23 skidoo. Mary McMahon on languagehumanties.com explores this interesting way of saying, "Let's get out of here FAST!"
People think of '23 skidoo' as a word child of the Roaring Twenties, says McMahon, but the term was around before then. It popped up in print in 1906, and 'skidoo' itself was around before that—-probably a shortened version of another word that emerged in the 1800's: skedaddle (another good way of suggesting a quick exit.)
Where did the '23' come from?
McMahon says there are several theories. Here's one I like.
New York City's Flatiron Building on 23rd Street (image from ResearchGate) has a weird shape. Because of its shape, weird air currents pulse around it. When women walked there in the early 1900's, it was quite possible those currents would find the hems of their skirts, flip them upward, and expose (gasp!) their ANKLES.
This created kind of a titillating free peep show, and men—bounders, no doubt—would hang around to take in the view.
The police were not amused, so they would come to 23rd Street and tell the men to skedaddle—would give them, in fact, the ol' 23 skidoo.
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Oh, this is so interesting. In fact, I find a list online of phrases and terms for moving with alacrity (how about 'greased lightning,' 'go like the clappers,' or 'get cracking,' for example?). But I have work to do, and the longer I make this post, the more I am, in reality, avoiding plunging into that work.
Chop chop, I tell myself.
And then I think, hey…
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Nope. Going to get the work done.
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My friends, may your troubles leave in a headlong rush and your joys linger like a tattoo kiss.
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