Meaning
An informal call to hurry up, get out of bed, and get moving. It began as a mid-nineteenth-century American expression for dancing and only later took on the hurrying sense in the early twentieth century. It is often confused with the separate Royal Navy wake-up call 'show a leg'. Casual, spoken register, usually as a jolly imperative to family or friends. Do not repeat the women-smuggled-aboard tale as fact; the standard reference treats it as folklore, and show a leg is a separate expression. Regional use: General English (American for shake; chiefly British for show).
Origin
Two distinct phrases are involved. Shake a leg is first documented as an American dancing expression, in the Dubuque Democratic Herald of October 1863; the hurry-up sense appears in New York Magazine in 1904, and the Phrase Finder stresses the two senses developed in sequence. Show a leg was the Royal Navy's morning call around the turn of the nineteenth century, first printed in Alfred Burton's naval poem The Adventures of Johnny Newcome in the Navy (1815); John Masefield later recorded the full call as 'Show a leg and put a stocking in it'. The popular story that the call let officers distinguish smuggled women's legs from sailors' legs, letting the women stay in bed, is explicitly doubted by the Phrase Finder's author: believe that if you will; personally, I don't.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- shake your leg
- shaking a leg
Usage Examples
- Come on, shake a leg, because the coach leaves at nine sharp and it will not wait for stragglers.
- His grandmother shouted up the stairs for him to shake a leg before the bacon went cold.
- If we shake a leg now, we can catch the earlier ferry and still be on the island by noon.