Hightailing it.

The phrase "high tail it" cracks me up. I picture a cat with its tail upright.


But where did this phrase come from? The Word Detective explains:

Oddly enough, the first printed occurrence of "hightail" as a verb meaning "to run away quickly" that anyone has yet found dates only back to 1919, a bit later than the setting of most cowboy dramas, but that's not necessarily an anachronism, because the term may have been in use for quite a while in the American West before anyone wrote it down. "To hightail" does indeed come from the behavior of animals in flight, many of which raise their tails in alarm as they flee. A citation from the journal American Speech in 1925 explains the phrase thus: "High-tail" comes straight from the plains where a mustang, when startled, erects his tail in a sudden, quick gesture and runs like the wind. So to make a sudden departure is to "high-tail."