To be ruined. This expression, which has meant to come to a bad end since the seventeenth century, assumes that dogs are inferior creatures, as so many other sayings do (a dog’s life, die like a dog, sick as a dog, and so on). It was already a cliché by the time Shaw wrote, “The country is going to the dogs” (Augustus Does His Bit, 1917).

To do something successfully and/or with great enthusiasm. A nineteenth-century Americanism, this expression probably originally alluded to the special treat of a trip to town for rural folks. “Chocolate creams are one of the things I am fondest of. I was feeling low and I went to town,” said a character in Erle Stanley Gardner’s The Case of the Silent Partner, indicating he had eaten a great many of them.

Abandoned by others, left in the lurch to carry the responsibility or blame. The implication in this expression, used since the eighteenth century, is that one is left holding an empty bag while others have made off with the presumably valuable contents. The phrase has often been used in international relations—for example, by Thomas Jefferson (“She will leave Spain the bag to hold,” Writings, 1793), and on the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, by Clare Boothe (Luce) in Europe in the Spring (1940): “When bigger and better bags are made, America will hold them.”