That’s Intense

As intense as all get-out

Welcome to “Off the Clock,” a little something that lands somewhere between Timeless & Timely.

I send out this fun look at language and words every other Saturday as bonus content. If someone sent this to you, please consider subscribing.

The Champions of the Mississippi – “A Race for the Buckhorns” by Frances Flora Bond Palmer, 1866 (public domain - Metropolitan Museum of Art)

If you were around these parts in June, I wrote an entry for Off the Clock called Unpaired Words, which included words such as overwhelm, nonplussed, and far-fetched.

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Unpaired Words

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Thanks to a comment by & Guild member Curtis Armstrong on that entry, we have a follow-up piece:

“I started this morning really gruntled. Thanks to this column I am feeling just as plussed as all get out. (Whatever “all get out” means. Possible topic for a future Saturday...)”

In reading his comment, I realized that after hearing that phrase for what amounts to my whole life, I wasn’t quite sure about its origins myself. Down the rabbit-hole I went — and I’m bringing you with me.

Every language has its way of turning the volume knob all the way up. In American English, one of the quirkiest dials is the phrase “as all get-out.” It’s the kind of intensifier that makes you lean in, grin, and wonder: get out of what, exactly?

The phrase popped up in the mid‑19th century, first in Joseph Neal’s Charcoal Sketches in 1838.¹