I can find this phrase in a few dictionaries:
knock-down, drag-out — marked by extreme violence or bitterness and by the showing of no mercy knock–down, drag–out political debates
But I don't fully understand why these two phrases became such a common saying. Why did this particular combination come to mean a particularly terrible fight or war? Is there something in each phrase that brings a particular meaning? Or does it just something that sounds catchy?
If it helps, here are the notes from etymonline that points toward the 1800s as the time of origin:
knock — Knock-down, drag-out is from 1827.
drag — Drag-out "violent fight" is from c.1859
"Drag-out" came to mean "violent fight" but almost 30 years after the phrase "knock-down, drag-out" was recorded. So why did the phrase include "drag-out"? What did it mean in the 1820s?
Best Answer
Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms, 1848, s.v. Drag out says ‘A “knock down and drag out” is a fight carried to extremities [my emphasis]. The term drag out seems also to be used, at the South, to denote a bully, a tearer’, and gives an instance:
I have always taken the phrase in more or less Chris’ sense: that a drag-out fight is one in which the defeated party is not only unable to rise for thirty seconds but remains indefinitely unconscious, so that he must be dragged out of the ring.
Early uses, however, show that drag out is an action performed by a fighter on his opponent:
The grisly character of that performance—and the ‘extremities’ to which a fight might be carried—is suggested in Richard Penn Smith's Colonel Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas ... Written by Himself (1837). On the road to Texas Crockett hears a fight in the distance, and arrives at the last moment:
It turns out that the ‘fight’ was no such thing, but a solo affair in which “the young man had played all the parts for his own amusement”; and the author says that
Unlikely as it may seem, the notion that drag-out originally signified mutilation appears to be corroborated in a US House of Representatives speech defying certain proposals by members from Kentucky:
I find it interesting that the two earliest instances of drag-out I have found, from 1826 and 1828, both originate with Rhode Island sources.