Wednesday's Random Slang-o-Rama: On the lam (oh yes, I am!)

When this post pops up, I will officially be on the lam. But not in the criminal sense...

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On the lam has a few definitions, according to Green's Dictionary of Slang. Starting in 1911, on the lam meant "quickly, at a run, at top speed." Then, in 1929, it took on the sense of "on the run from prison or the police, thus fig. on the loose." In 1939, on the lam also evolved to mean "elsewhere." 

Mental Floss has a nice article about the origin of on the lam right here, as well as some fascinating background on the origin of lam (which is the "mystery word" in this phrase, to my way of thinking):

...As a verb in its own right, however, lam dates back as far as the late 16th century. The Oxford English Dictionary has unearthed it in a dictionary compiled in the mid-1590s (alongside a long-lost equivalent form, belam), but back then the word’s meaning was considerably different: in 16th century English, to lam meant “to beat” or “to thrash someone harshly.”...

Lam survived in this original sense until the 19th century when, having steadily fallen out of everyday use, it began to crop up in the schoolyard slang of British (and later American) schoolchildren. By the mid-1800s, lamming out or lamming into someone was being widely used in reference to schoolyard fights and scuffles, and it’s perhaps through association with schoolboys running away before they were caught fighting by their teachers (or else, with the hapless victim running away before the first blow was thrown) that lamming finally came to be used to mean “to escape” or “to abscond.”

In this sense, lam first appeared in print on its own in 1886, in Allan Pinkerton’s memoir Thirty Years A Detective. In it, Pinkerton—the Scotland-born founder of Chicago’s renowned Pinkerton National Detective Agency—describes in detail the precise operations of a pickpocketing gang..."

You can read Pinkerton's chapter on how pickpockets worked their trade in the 19th century right here, courtesy of Internet Archive.  If you just want to go to the passage that mentions lam, here's the link. 

Meanwhile, I'm off and running. Running where? The photo below is a no-so-subtle hint.... 

Not a bad place to be on the lam...
Image by Jean-Philippe Fourier from Pixabay