Learn English – Where does the phrase, “Costs an arm and a leg” come from

Two immediate lexical progenitors produced transitive use of the colloquial phrasal verb 'to pull off' in the sense of

2. trans. colloq. To succeed in accomplishing, achieving, or producing (something); to carry off.

OED, 'to pull off'

Those two progenitors were uses in these senses:

1. trans.
a. To take away or detach (something) by pulling from where it is held or attached. ....

b. To take off (one's coat, etc.); to doff (one's hat).

op. cit.

Senses 1a and 1b are attested in OED from before 1425 (citation composed before 1399) and around 1500, respectively. Sense 2 is attested from 1860:

Baily's Monthly Mag. 1 34 After the good old matches of Club and Ground against Cambridge and against Oxford are pulled off at the two Universities, the London Season will open.

Although pulling off boots and coats, etc. (1b), often has a sudden, tangential element of success, it is likely that, at least in the US, transitional, figurative political uses played directly into the ready adoption of the sense denoting successful accomplishment, achievement or production.

A painstaking examination of primary sources — uses in the popular press — showed continuing dominance of sense 1b into the mid-1800s (lots of clothes were pulled off during that period), along with, much less frequent, uses in sense 1a (often with reference to pulling off parts of plants in articles concerning agriculture and gardening; sometimes with reference to pulling off flesh and skin).

The principal difference between senses 1 and 2 is relative materiality. Sense 1 takes tactile material as its object: boats, clothes, vegetation, flesh. The later sense 2 takes ideas or concepts as its object: a win, a success, an accomplishment, an achievement. Such chronological development of lexical sense is a standard process; it goes alongside the usually less-definable adoption of figurative senses.

Some transitional US uses, notably political, illustrate the development of the sense, from material things pulled off to immaterial, by way of figurative uses:

The Democratic Journals in New York have a mournful look. Fillmore, on one side, pulls on the anti Ostend conservative men, and Fremont, on the other, pulls off the Germans, Irish, &c., ....

The Wilmington Daily Herald (Wilmington, North Carolina), 18 Jul 1856.

---

Three times he has left governmental posts, ...after brave displays of political pluck; and now, for the fourth time he pulls off his cabinet cloak and throws it in the faces of his old fogy associates.

True American (Steubenville, Ohio) 08 Mar 1855.

These early, figurative US uses from 1855 and 1856 precede the earliest US use of 'pull off' in sense 2 found, from 1858:

His crowning success, however, was to pull off the two thousand guineas stake with Fitz Roland and the Derby with Beardsman.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle (Brooklyn, New York) 05 Jun 1858.

As will be deduced from the currency of the stakes, if nothing else, that 1858 use, although it appears in a US newspaper, refers to an English horserace.

Setting aside the US transitional, figurative uses of 'pull off' in political contexts, and turning to UK uses, evidence of the development of transitive sense 2 appears earlier. In 1851, for example, rhetorically linked uses of the intransitive verbal phrase 'came off' and the transitive 'carry off' prepare for a third with the transitive 'pull [something] off'. The general subject is horse racing, and the direct object is an event:

The opening race across the flat came off in favour of the four-year-old Triennial winner...we suggested the probability of some undreamt of outsider carrying off the prize...[w]hether he has won or not, old Joe Rogers will delight in the accomplishment of the feat, for he...abhors pulling an event off with a favourite.

The Era (London) 19 October 1851

A slightly (four days) earlier use in scare quotes suggests the application of 'pull off' to the immaterial object of a horse-racing title is a neologism...at least as concerns the author of the piece and his judgement of Dublin readers' familiarity with the use of the phrase:

...and Mr. Quin's Whiff "pulling" off the First Class of Trainers' Stakes.

Freeman's Journal (Dublin) Wednesday 15 October 1851

Here again, in the UK, uses of 'pull off' in sense 2 are presaged by figurative uses in political contexts in sense 1b; such figurative use again involves the removal of articles of attire. One such, a very early instance, is this citation from the OED sense 1b attestations:

1677 W. Hubbard Narr. Troubles with Indians New-Eng. (new ed.) ii. 32 He pulled off his Vizour of a friend, and discovered what he was.

Another, contemporaneous with (although a few days earlier than) the 1851 uses in horse-racing contexts:

If the Roman Catholic Prelates...will come forward to denounce...the doings of Italian tyrants...we shal sing our palinodia with good will...[t]ill than, we shall continue to regard them as accomplices of the Emperor of Austria and Marshal Haynau...as so many MacHales and Cullens in disguise, waiting for the suitable moment to pull off the mask, draw the sword, and throw away the scabbard. — The Patriot

Belfast Mercury 02 October 1851

Figurative uses with reference to the pulling off of masks were thematic in the evidence I examined pertaining to sense 1b.

Side Note on 'Stake' and 'Stakes'

It may be objected to the foregoing account that a 'stake' is material: valuable goods or money wagered on the outcome of a bet, game, or event. So, then, uses of 'pull off' with, as direct object, the 'stake' wagered on a horse race, must at least be said to be figurative uses in sense 1a ("to take away" something "by pulling from where it is held"), rather than sense 2 ("to succeed at something" or "to win something").

However, the citations shown make clear that, where 'stake' or 'stakes' is used as the object of 'pulling off', it is being used in a specialized sense, and denotes the race (singular) or class of race (plural), rather than the material prize. The sense is OED sense 3a of stake, n.²:

pl. in Horse Racing, Coursing, etc., the sums of money staked or subscribed by the owners who enter horses or dogs for a contest, the whole to be received as the prize by the owner of the winner or divided among the owners of the animals ‘placed’, as declared in the conditions of the contest. Hence in sing. (cf. SWEEPSTAKE n.) a race for money thus staked or subscribed. Also in pl. with defining words as the designation of particular races or classes of races in which the sum of money staked is the prize as distinguished from a Plate (see PLATE n. 4), Cup, or the like.

(Bold emphasis mine.)

Thus, where the direct object of 'pull off' shown in the citations is not the "match" (1860, Bailey's Monthly Mag) or the "event" (1851, The Era), but rather "the two thousand guineas stake" (1858, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle) or the "First Class of Trainers' Stakes" (1851, Freemans Journal), the denotation of 'stake' is the race and the denotation of 'Stakes' is the class of race.

Dictionary coverage of 'get cracking'

J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994) reports that "get cracking" came into U.S. English from the UK during the 1940s:

get cracking to get busy; get going. {This phr[ase] came into U.S. speech through contact with British armed forces during WWII.}

Lighter's first citation for the phrase is from Eric Partridge, Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1936), as "Get cracking, begin work."

It appears to have caught on as a naturalized phrase fairly quickly, however, since it appears in Harold Wentworth & Stuart Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, first edition (1960):

cracking, get Start; start moving; begin working; begin to exert oneself. Often in the phrase let's get cracking.

The entry for "get cracking" in the original edition of Eric Partridge, Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1936) is actually a bit more detailed than Lighter's citation suggests:

get cracking. To begin work : Royal Air Force : from ca. 1925. I.e. cracking on speed.

Earlier in the same dictionary, Partridge has this entry for cracking as an adjective:

cracking, adj. Very fast ; exceedingly vigorous (-- 1880) : slightly ob[solete, in 1936]

By the fifth edition (1961) of the dictionary, however, Partridge had evidently rethought the place of "get cracking" in the larger scheme of similar phrases and had adopted the entry that ghoppe reports in a different answer here, with the suggestion that it might have its origin in "whip-cracking at the mustering of cattle."

Early Google Books matches

Google Search results generally support Partridge's1936 reading of the phrase. The earliest relevant matches are from 1938, and one of them is RAF-specific. From Popular Flying, volume 6, issue 9 (1938) [combined snippets]:

We've got a new vocabulary in Black Bourton, the vocabulary of the R.A.F. Nice things are "wizard"; nasty people are "ropey types," and a reckless man is "split." One is "browned off" when one is rather depressed; the ground is the "deck" and the sky is the "ceiling"; dull-witted people are "drips," and when in a hurry we ask each other to get "cracking." This strange lingo is, of course, subject to changes and ex-R.A.F. men of several years ago would find themselves hopelessly dated by the expressions they use.

There is, however, one outlying instance of "got cracking"—or more precisely "got cracking away"—that might be significant as well. From Bertram Milford, In the Whirl of the Rising (1904), a novel seemingly set in Rhodesia during the Second Matabele War, of 1896–1897:

"You must have had the very devil of a scrap, Peters." one of these [horsemen from Green's Scouts, a relieving force] was saying. "We could hear you banging away from the time you began, and pushed our gees for all they'd carry; for we reckoned all that shooting meant a big thing and no bally skirmish. ... They [the Matabele forces] didn't know we were there till we got cracking away right in their faces, or mostly backs. Magtig! Didn't they skip. ..."

Here it seems pretty clear that "got cracking away" means "started firing our guns." Is this usage connected to the later World War II use of "get cracking"? It's difficult to say. If there is a connection, the literal slang term for gunfire would have to have transmuted into a more figurative sense of getting started. Still, both usages have a strong tie to military usage, and a connection is not impossible.

Conclusion

No reference work has convincingly tracked "get cracking" to its original lair. The term does seem to be of UK English origin, but whether it originated in the RAF in 1925, or in Rhodesia in the late 1890s, or in some bucolic setting to the sound of bullwhips bring cattle into order for transportation or migration remains unclear.