saw off
v. phr.— «Saw-off. To stop. Also to interupt, silence. “When we get this done, we’ll saw off for the day.” Noted in Tennessee but nowhere else. The expression likely is derived from the sense of completion that comes to sawyers when the cut drops from the log they are working on. Heard in the woods, among timber workers. “I sawed him off with an answer that he won’t forget for some time.” General.» —by Harry Harrison Kroll in George Peabody College for Teachers A Comparative Study of Upper and Lower Southern Folk Speech (Martin, Tennesee) Aug., 1925. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
Many of us struggled with the Old English poem “Beowulf” in high school. But what if you could actually hear “Beowulf” in the English of today? There’s a new translation by Maria Dahvana Headley that uses contemporary...
What if, instead of being an inanimate object, a dictionary were alive? That’s the idea behind a lavishly illustrated new children’s book called The Dictionary Story (Bookshop|Amazon) by Oliver Jeffers and Sam Winston. This is part of a...