Amy in North Carolina grew up in a household of nine children, where persistent whining might draw her mother’s good-natured command: Go dry up and bust! The older slang imperative Dry up! has meant Stop talking! since the mid-1800s, a wish for the stream of talk to stop. The longer form may intensify the image—if the words quit flowing, they build up until the complainer busts—and it has a cousin in dry up and blow away. In theater, to dry up is also to forget one’s lines. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Go Dry up and Bust” Means to Stop Talking and Disappear”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Amy, and I’m calling from North Carolina.
Hi, Amy. Welcome to the show.
So I had a question.
My husband and I were driving home from the beach where we frequently listen to your show, and he said, you know, you should call them and find out where that thing your mother always used to say.
And what that thing was, was when she would, first of all, I have eight siblings, so things used to get a little hectic in my house sometimes.
I guess so.
And my mother would tell us when we were just really annoying her and complaining about how unfair life was and somebody was being mean to us, she would say, oh, please, just go dry up and bust.
And we wondered where that came from and what exactly it meant.
Well, I knew what it meant, but where it came from, I guess, is the question.
We all knew what it meant.
Oh, my.
So your mom had eight kids running around.
She had nine.
Oh, nine kids.
Oh, my goodness.
Yeah, yeah.
And so it would be when you all were making a lot of noise or complaining?
So when we couldn’t have something we wanted and, you know, can’t we do this, can’t we do that?
And she’d say no, and then we’d keep at it.
She’d say, listen, you guys just need to go try out with us because it’s not happening.
Dry up and bust.
I’d say it to my kids when they were little, and they just used to look at me and say, and how do we do that?
Right.
Oh, that’s wonderful.
Well, you know, Amy, since the mid-19th century, dry up has meant to stop talking.
It’s meant to be quiet, to stop the flow of words from coming out of your mouth.
Just the term dry up.
And I’m thinking that dry up and bust, maybe if you stop that flow of words, they’re going to build up and you might bust.
Although another version of this is dry up and blow away.
And I think both of those phrases just suggest stop talking and disappear.
Well, that’s sort of the gist we got was to just disappear.
But she said it good-naturedly, it sounds like.
Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
Pretty much?
Well, yeah, that’s pretty much what it means.
Dry up means to be quiet.
And, in fact, in the theater world, people use the term dry up to mean to forget your words, forget your lines.
Somebody dry it up.
Oh, huh, huh.
So there you go.
One more thing before you go, Amy.
There’s a fancy version of this, which is desiccate can also mean to stop talking.
You tell somebody to desiccate themselves.
Oh, that’s wonderful.
I didn’t know that, but that literally means to dry up.
That’s right, yeah.
Interesting.
Thank you so much for your call.
We really appreciate it.
All right, great.
Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
All righty, bye.
Dry up and bust.
I never hear that.
Do you, Grant?
No, no, that’s kind of old-fashioned.
It looks like it might be kind of a Western American countryfied term, right?
Kind of a cowboys and, I don’t know, ranches and gold rush kind of word, right?
Yeah, just like dry up and blow away across the prairie.
Yeah, yeah.
It feels like tumbleweeds.
Don’t dry up.
Let it flow.
