Go to grass is In the 1600s, go to grass meant to be knocked down. In the 1800s, the phrase was the equivalent of telling someone to die and go to hell. Go to grass has also been used to refer to a racehorse or working horse that’s been retired from service. A variant is go to grass and eat hay. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Go to Grass”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Nikki calling from Dallas, Texas. How are you guys?
Doing well. How are you, Nikki?
I wanted to ask you guys about a phrase that I’ve always heard my grandmother say since I was young. She would say the phrase, go to grass. We always used to chuckle as kids. I don’t think we really understood what it meant. We just thought it was funny. And the more I listen to your show, I think, huh, I wonder where that phrase comes from and what exactly it means.
Wait a second. So what are the circumstances that she uses this? So what’s happening when she says something about going to grass?
So it would typically be like if my grandfather was kind of, you know, nagging at her for doing something or if she’s, you know, cooking and something spilled on the stove. It was just kind of like an exclamation of, oh, go to grass.
Oh, is this kind of a polite way of saying go to hell or bug off?
I think so.
Go jump in a lake?
Okay.
Something like that. There’s two kind of separate histories for go to grass, and I think they’re both connected here. Back to the 1600s, go to grass meant to be knocked down, say, if you were a fighter or a boxer. So you would be knocked down onto the grass. But the more important one here is more recently, as far back as the early to mid-1800s, go to grass meant to go to hell, literally, meaning die, be buried, and have grass grow on your grave.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, so it’s basically, you know, go dig a dirt farm and live in it, basically.
Right. Well, that makes a lot of sense. My grandma grew up in Brooklyn. Her parents are from Italy, and her father was a preacher. So I don’t think there was much probably cursing going on in the house. So maybe it was a more polite way.
Yeah, euphemism. There’s a couple other things to say to this. If you have animals, if a horse goes to grass, for example, say it’s a racing horse, it means that you’re kind of withdrawing it from regular competition or withdrawing it from stud duties or that sort of thing. So it kind of means go to grass could mean, in a farm context, get out of my hair, go keep yourself busy. I don’t need you here anymore. You’re not relevant to what’s going on. That’s a more polite interpretation.
Yeah, that’s like another version of it, go to grass and eat hay.
Yeah.
Go to grass and eat hay.
Gotcha.
Okay.
All right. Well, thank you guys so much. I’ll be happy to report that back to her.
All right, Nikki. Thanks for doing so.
Thank you.
All right.
Thank you. Have a good one.
All right.
Bye-bye.
In the Dictionary of American Regional English, by the way, which has a nice entry on go to grass, they have a note to see the entry for Halifax. Did you see this?
No.
Halifax used to be used as a euphemistic way to saying go to hell.
Oh, go to Halifax.
Halifax.
Yeah. Both the Halifax and the New World and in the Old. Isn’t that interesting?
I love that. But there are so many ways that we take impolite language and we clean it up a little bit, put some lipstick on it, and take most of the sting out of it, but just a little bit left.
Go to Halifax.
I like that one a lot.
Yeah, go to Halifax and back. That’s going in my word bucket.
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