devil take the hindmost, the

Too bad for whoever or whatever is last or left behind. The term comes, it is thought, from children’s games like tag, in which the person left behind is the loser. By the sixteenth century it had been transferred to out-and-out selfishness (“Every one for him selfe, and the divel for all,” John Florio, First Fruites, 1578). Beaumont and Fletcher wrote, “What if . . . they run all away, and cry the Devil take the hindmost?” (Philaster, 1608, 5.1).