Please take leave of the premises…before I take hold of a shotgun!

  Do, please, stay long enough to read this brief post.   Your compiler is writing about taking leave of premises, not imploring his readers actually to do so!

     Who, besides perhaps a lawyer or a judge (verbiage after the ellipsis points in the title excepted) would put it so rigidly as, “Please take leave of the premises.”?   A simple ,  “Thank you for coming by,” is generally enough to do the dislodging trick, if one is trying to maintain politeness in hinting it’s time for guests to leave.  “It’s been great visiting with you today,” tends to work equally well as an invitation to dismissal.

     But what if one sees a deer chomping down on a prized landscaping plant, or an armadillo rooting up one’s carefully tended beds, or a stray dog liable to lead one’s own pet into peril?  Comedian Jeff Foxworthy was, to the best of  your compiler’s knowledge and belief, the first to isolate the Southern bellow we use, but he was spot-on.  It’s universal (the South being pretty much all the universe a true Southerner is interested in, for his or her time on this earth, anyhow) and it’s primal:

GITOWNOUTTAHEAHNOW!

     Southerners tend to run it all together as a single word, and it just feels good to say it.  Give it a try, if you’d like – the first syllable is always emphasized:

GITOWNOUTTAHEAHNOW!

     Hoke Coleman, the character played marvelously by Morgan Freeman in Driving Miss Daisy, would say something similar but in a different usage. When something would tickle him (Southern for “make him laugh”),  Hoke would say, “Git on away from heah now, Idella!” (or Miss Daisy, or Mr. Werthan, or whomever he was talking to.)  Even though virtually identical in verbiage to “Gitownouttaheahnow,”  Hoke’s comment means something like, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!  You just won’t do!”, while  GITOWNOUTTAHEAHNOW basically means what the title says: “Please take leave of the premises before I take hold of a shotgun!”

      Another similar but much less intense usage it the one someone might say if you were to tell her something so incredible as to be almost unbelievable.   That’s, “Get out of here!  No way!’, or some variation thereof.   It’s basically the equivalent of, “That’s incredible!”, and while it shares much verbiage with GITOWNOUTTAHEAHNOW!, the respective meanings are poles apart.

   “GITOWNOUTTAHEAHNOW!” – it literally means, “Get gone ‘fore I get a gun!” when used in threatening voice, but we sometimes use it playfully as well,   It all depends on the voice tone and context, so consider yourselves forewarned and forearmed.    And now that we have explained that particular phenomenon as thoroughly as possible, we can all GITOWNOUTTAHEAHNOW – and your compiler is going with you!