Get Lost!
Another dispatch from the Last Empty Places
Quick announcement: Last week threw a few curveballs our way, so Peter, Clare, and I are running a little behind. As a result, last week's Last Empty Places will drop this Sunday. After that, we should be back on track. In the meantime, here's a preview of what's to come...
Take a little bit of ancient Norse and slam it into some Old English, and you have the best response to anyone invading your physical or mental space: get lost!
It’s a mosh pit of an idiom.
“Get” makes it way into our language from the folks who also gave us the Vikings. “Geta” is Norse to express having made it to a desired state or location. Those raiders did a lot of “geta.” That’s kinda perfect because “to get” isn’t too far from “to grab,” which the Vikings did a lot of, especially when it came to England.
The origins of “lost” are darker still. It comes from the Old English losian, meaning “to perish,” “be destroyed,” or “go astray.” In another sense, you could say the Vikings spent a fair amount of time trying to help the English get lost until King Athelstan decided in 927 AD that the Anglo-Saxons would much rather not. The meet-cute opportunity between “get” and “lost” was, appropriately enough, lost.
Have I lost you yet?
It wasn’t until the United States of the mid-1940s that “get” and “lost” finally teamed up. The phrase was probably circulating in places like Brooklyn through the Yiddish ver farvalgert (“become lost”) before it started appearing in Life Magazine, Alfred Lunt’s radio broadcasts, bestsellers like The Hucksters, and Bob Hope’s memoir I Never Left Home.
That’s when “get lost” really gets going.
And it opens the door to telling ass clowns of all ages how far they can go when they’ve gone too far: “take a hike,” “beat it,” “scram,” “vamoose,” “take a long walk off a short pier,” “hit the bricks,” and “tell your story walking,” plus countless regional variations for moments when you’ve had all you can stand and you can’t stand no more.
I have a particular fondness for the New Orleans’ Irish Channel variation: “hit the banquette!”
And I am so glad we have found “get lost,” because Peter and I intend to deploy it liberally in the June 21 edition of Last Empty Places. We’re aiming it squarely at this guy:
Along with apparently eating the lead from his pencils, this Free Press reporter seems to have spent his formative years as the designated speechwriter for schoolyard bullies who weren't clever enough to come up with their own insults.
More to come.