This is the All Ears English Podcast, Episode 2438.
Get out of dodge with this American culture vocabulary.
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Have you ever heard someone say the phrase, get out of dodge?
Find out what this famous expression alludes to and exactly when you can use it.
Plus, get another way to say, let's leave in English.
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Hello, Aubrey. How's it going today?
I'm great, Lindsay.
How are you? Good. Excited to be here on All Ears English.
What are we getting into today?
Well, I have a question for you.
This is one of my favorite films, especially when I was younger, like in college.
Have you ever seen the film Tombstone?
I actually don't think I've seen the whole film all the way through.
It's a Western. I love it.
It is a western. I watched it so many times with my family or my siblings.
I can quote so many lines from it.
And it was very quotable.
Val Kilmer was Doc Holliday.
And he has so many great lines.
I'm your Huckleberry is one of them.
I'm your Huckleberry, which it's like really, he's saying like, I'm the person you need.
And you'll hear sometimes some of these have sort of been adopted into English to the phrases from this film.
So I highly recommend it.
Everybody Everybody watched Tombstone.
Yeah, I think I should probably watch it to get some inside phrases that maybe are probably being used all the time.
And I didn't know they were coming from that.
I'm curious if you'll watch it and be like, wait, I've heard people saying that I didn't know it was from this film.
Right, right, exactly.
But it's about the shootout at the O .K.
Corral. This is very famous.
It happened in Tombstone, Arizona, which is actually only about two and a half miles, two and a half, two and a half hour drive south of Phoenix, where I live.
So it's not that far from here, but I've actually never been to Tombstone.
I need to go. I need to take my kids because it's like an old west town or kind of recreated town, sort of like Jackson Hole.
I've heard it's fun.
We'll have to go sometime.
Very cool. And so how does this tie into the phrase we want to talk about today, Aubrey?
Yeah, so this phrase, get out of Dodge, came up in a recent episode.
Stay to the end and we'll share which one it was in case you missed it because you can definitely listen to these out of order.
but we promise to follow up with a very interesting history of where of where this phrase comes from and then also how we use it because we do use it a lot it's very common you'll hear it and then a few phrases that mean the same thing yeah this is so important to know because this is one of the phrases that most native speakers of English just in probably just in the US I'm guessing do use it and they on a gut level know what it means but if you sit down and ask them where it comes comes from and more more detailed what it actually means i have a feeling they wouldn't really know right exactly
right and even me i've watched tombstone so many times and i still didn't know a lot of this history so it was fun to dive in learn some of the history about dodge city and we're excited to share it with you guys today yeah so tell us what it means abri i mean don't leave us in the dark any longer right okay so we need to give credit to tyler guthrie in june 2023 wrote an article called Where the Phrase Get Out of Dodge Comes From, and he did his research. It was fascinating, all of the information about Dodge City.
We're going to share some things from that article.
This phrase means to leave quickly, get out of Dodge, to leave a place or a situation, usually that's uncomfortable or unsafe.
Let's give a few examples first. For example, you might say, this party's dead.
If everyone's leaving, it's not very fun.
Let's get out of Dodge means like, this isn't fun anymore.
Let's go. Got it. Or I need a fresh start in another city.
It's time to, it's time I got out of.
Sorry. It's time I got out of Dodge.
Got out of Dodge. Right.
And we often, we, you know, we don't say I got out of Dodge or we need to get out of Dodge.
We run those together and say out of, I got to get out of Dodge.
I wonder if the residents of Dodge City, Kansas have some kind of, I don't know, have fun with this in some way or something, right?
right? If you have an actual phrase named after your town, how cool is that?
Probably, right? I wonder.
But yeah, so it did originate in Dodge City, Kansas in the 1870s.
So Dodge City was first a cow town in the old West. What does that mean, a cow town, Lindsay?
A cow town. I've actually heard people call Denver, Colorado a cow town, but now it's a city.
But I guess it means it was a base for cattle ranchers.
Actually, I don't know.
It was a settlement.
Before it was a big city, it would be a settlement, so people lived there, where cowboys would bring their cattle and then there would either be a railroad or shipyards where they would send the cows to butchering markets in the east. In Dodge City, at first, it was a smaller settlement, and then when the railroad reached Dodge City, it became a boom town.
town. So what is that?
Yeah. So our listeners who are in our Connected Communicator course know that a boom town is a town which has or had an economy that was booming around especially one specific product.
Exactly. Yes. So it's a town that quickly grows prosperous.
So for Dodge City, it was because of the cattle market.
The railroad became a major hub for the cattle trade.
And so So the peak years for this was like 1883 to 1884.
So because of that boom, Dodge City became infamous, which means famous, but often for negative things, became infamous for being extremely dangerous because there were a lot of not only cowboys, but a lot of thieves, right?
A lot of those negative characters, a lot of criminals.
And for some time, Dodge City was lawless.
People could sort of get away with anything because there weren't lawmen keeping order there.
Fascinating. Okay. That piece I didn't really know.
So it was a crime town, crime ridden town.
And so that's where that energy comes from.
We need to get out of here.
Right, right. Exactly right.
That's where this phrase comes from.
We got to get out of Dodge because it was unsafe, right?
All of these dangerous people were there.
So it wasn't really a safe place for families, for people to live.
But then that changed when Wyatt Earp and And William Barclay, whose nickname was Bat Masterson, came and they were lawmen who were like fearless.
So they tried to sort of bring some law to Dodge City and they were called peace officers.
What does that mean, Lindsay, for someone to be called a peace officer?
Yeah. So this idea that they were representatives of the law, they were trying to restore peace in that specific town.
town. Exactly. Right.
So like a cop now, a police officer, we wouldn't call them a peace officer because this was sort of a specific title for someone trying to bring peace to a town that was quite lawless and dangerous.
Right. Wow. So this that's where this phrase get out of Dodge came from.
But also Wyatt Earp became very famous because he was able to bring peace to Dodge City.
It became a place that was safe for people to live.
And then he was there as a lawman until the 1880s when the cowboy scene was kind of dying.
The frontier was being settled.
It was becoming more industrial.
And so then Wyatt Earp moved to Tombstone, where the shootout at the OK Corral happened.
He was just trying to make his living there.
I don't know how much the facts in the film Tombstone are accurate, but that's about the events leading up to the shootout at the OK Corral.
Maybe this is the movie I'll watch this weekend.
This is good. It sounds like the a nickname stuck though.
They did make it a safer place, but it still kind of remained this idea of get out of Dodge is get out of a place that is something's wrong with the place.
Is that right? Exactly.
Right. So we use it pretty flexibly.
It might be like, I actually feel unsafe here.
Let's get out of Dodge.
Like you're in a dark alley.
Suddenly you're like, oh, we got to get out of Dodge.
I feel unsafe. But it also might be that party example where it's like, this just isn't that fun.
Let's go. You might be like, we got to get out of Dodge.
Yeah. I love it. So good.
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Okay, Aubrey, we are back.
And I do want to remind our listeners, guys, hit the follow button before we go any further in this episode, because we're getting real background here.
We want to start using native phrases, but also understanding where they come from and this is how we do it okay absolutely right the old west is fascinating um in i know a lot of people come to the states and you want to see these ghost towns these old towns jackson hole wyoming i worked there for a summer so fun but it's also really interesting the vocabulary the phrases that come out of this history interesting what did you do in jackson did you have a job at a shop or what was your job there so i moved there because a friend was living there and the hotels would give you free room and board
if you were like a housekeeper.
So then we would do that in the morning.
I cleaned rooms at the 49er Inn.
And then I had a job in the evening at the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar gift shop.
I was only 18, 17. So I couldn't work in the actual bar.
There was like a gift shop before you go into the bar.
And I was like a cashier in the gift shop.
How fun. Jacksonville is a great little town.
I love it. It's very cool.
Yeah. If you guys come to the States, you got to for sure go see Jackson Jackson Hole and West Yellowstone National Park.
It's such a beautiful area and really fun.
All right. So what else?
Okay. So this is what we're expressing here with this expression is I need to get out of this place.
But are there other ways we might say this?
Yes, exactly. Right.
We want to share a few other phrases.
The first one is very similar, but we just remove dodge.
We'll just say like, let's get out of here.
Right. Oh, I feel uncomfortable.
Let's get out of here.
And so it's very similar.
This is definitely more common, right?
Get Out of Dodge is a little more specific to certain scenarios or, you know, you'll hear it, but not that often.
Whereas this you'll hear all the time.
Let's get out of here.
Yeah, this is more broad.
It applies to more scenarios.
Yes. This club is empty.
We got to get out of here, right?
Exactly. And then another one's interesting is Vominos, which is a transliteration of Spanish, Vominos, which means let's go or let's leave. So we use this a lot in English.
Do you use this or hear this, Lindsay?
I hear it a lot. Yeah, for sure.
Absolutely. Vamanos, right?
Right? Yes, yeah. We might say, oh, you said you wanted to leave at 8, right?
Well, Vamanos. Let's go.
Yeah. There are absolutely Spanish, French, Italian words, we've done multiple episodes on this phenomenon that we adopt certain words and change them around.
Maybe you don't hear them in that way in their original language, but we use them for sure.
Yes, exactly. Right.
There are a lot of these transliterations in English.
Some of them we use exactly the same as it is in French, like cul -de -sac or Spanish, you know, burrito, tortilla.
There are so many words we use them the same.
And there are some that we either change the pronunciation of or the spelling of.
And this is a transliteration.
So actually, guys, be sure to hit follow because we're going to do a follow up here on Allers English very soon of other common transliterations.
Yeah. So fun. All right.
Aubrey, everyone else doing it.
Let's do a role play here.
You and I are at a state fair for this role play.
All right. Here we go.
All right. I'll start us.
I'm not feeling well.
I should not have ridden the Gravitron.
Oh, time to get out of Dodge.
Yeah, I think so. Sorry.
I know you wanted to stay longer.
No worries. Vamanos.
Nice. No worries. Vamanos.
Let's go. You have to say that with energy, right?
And intonation. It would be kind of weird to be like Vamanos.
No, you would but never, you know, all right, so good.
So you said, well, I said, you know, I see that you're not feeling well, right?
And this is not even about the state fair.
This is about your condition, right?
I don't, I look sick.
And this has happened to me.
There's this ride that I mentioned here, the Gravitron is one that spins very fast in a circle.
And so it takes away gravity and you end up like pinned against the wall and you're trying to move like you're on the moon, I guess, right?
right? It makes me so ill.
Is it after the ride that you feel ill or during the ride?
Okay. It's after. When I get up and stop spinning and I get off, I'm like, what was I thinking?
Until you're messed up for the rest of the day or something.
I would have thought during the ride and then you get off, you're okay, but no. No. I'm fine during the ride.
Once I stop spinning, I'm like, ooh.
Oh, boy. And then what did I say?
Right. I'm like, okay, I think we should go.
You're like, oh, time to get out of Dodge, right so you're saying you see that I'm sick you're like let's go we got to get out of here yes exactly and then he said yeah I think so sorry I know you wanted to stay longer and then I I said this in a very upbeat way I said no worries laminas so it's kind of silly you're being kind of funny you're having fun with the language right when you say that expression and this is interesting to think about the connection skill here because if you were wanting to stay somewhere longer and your friend needs to leave for whatever reason they're they're sick, they're
injured, something happens.
You can make them feel badly about that.
If you're like, it's fine, I guess we can go.
Totally. Or you can do it in a very upbeat, friendly way, like you did here.
No worries. Vamanos.
And I think that's probably the takeaway right there, Aubrey.
I'm glad you pointed out the connection skill here.
What is the art of saying we need to go in a way that doesn't, I don't know, bring people down?
Yes, exactly. Right.
Doesn't make anyone feel bad for being the reason we have to leave because we've all been there.
We've all all been the friend who has come with someone else so they're all right and we're ready to go and they can either make us feel badly when we're like can we go or they can be like yeah no problem at all and what a way to connect to keep that connection to let them feel like no problem i'm ready to go too yeah that's it and sometimes it's the choice of words sometimes it's the intonation or both right so exactly so good aubrey what's another episode our listeners could check out out.
Yes. This is the episode where get out of dodge came up.
It was 24 18 right here on all ears English.
Don't dance around this English vocabulary.
And we use this phrase, get out of dodge.
And we're like, when we're talking about dodging a topic, right.
Avoiding a topic. So yeah, be sure to check that one out as well.
I love it. Great episode today, guys.
Don't, uh, don't forget to hit follow right here on your podcast player and Aubrey, I'll see you back here very soon.
All right. See you next time.
All right. Take care.
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