“Get the Lead Out”
G-DRAGON — “CROOKED”
💭 Meaning
To “get the lead out” is to hurry up, move faster, or stop being slow or sluggish; it is often said with impatience to spur someone into action.
✍️ Examples
Henry told his student to get the lead out and submit her supplemental essays before the portal closed for the night.
The admissions office finally got the lead out and processed a backlog of applications before the deadline.
Henry's colleagues told him to get the lead out on the final report so they could close the files and move on.
📜 Origin
The exact origin is debated, with several overlapping theories. The most widely cited traces the phrase to early-to-mid 20th-century American slang, where “lead" symbolized heaviness and sluggishness, as in having “lead in your shoes" or “lead in your pants." Some sources tie the phrase to 1930s baseball slang, used to urge slow base runners to pick up the pace, while others point to World War II-era military and aviation use, where soldiers or pilots were told to “get the lead out" of their gear or engines to move more quickly. Regardless of the exact source, the phrase had fully embedded itself in American speech by the mid-20th century as an energetic way to tell someone to speed up.
