From this movies blog.

Leave us face it, Ace is a bummer movie and general audiences have never been crazy about it.

How would Americans hear that use of ‘Leave’ for ‘Let’? A perfectly normal standard alternative, a regional usage, old-fashioned? To the ear of this Englishman it sounds distinctly odd, at least in current speech.

Another example.

Leave Us Go Root for the Dodgers

When I was a kid, 65 years ago, a few old persons would say “leave us”.

Non-standard, somewhat regional.  I associate it with a blue-collar Brooklyn accent, although I haven’t checked any references to see if that impression is supported by real data.

Sometimes, like other non-standard usages associated with uneducated speech, used deliberately for ironic or comic effect.

The usage is uncommon.  I have heard the usage, as Dr. T notes, in old comedy routines such as “The Three Stooges” where the characters are affecting upper class manners (just prior to the scene degenerating into a pie fight).

In my 10th grade grammar class, using “leave” where “let” should have been used was cause to stay after school and write “I can leave the classroom when Miss Barkley decides to let me leave”. She would sit in the back of the room until students had written this sentence out a hundred times. I suspect everyone who ever had her as a teacher cringes when they hear “leave us go”.

Dr. Techie - 19 October 2008 12:09 PM

Non-standard, somewhat regional.  I associate it with a blue-collar Brooklyn accent, although I haven’t checked any references to see if that impression is supported by real data.

I,too associate the expression “leave go of that” with a working class accent from an industrial area of the UK, but it could also be Cockney.

lh will be interested to know that this usage is condemned by Oliver Strunk in his book “The Elements of Style”, chapter IV “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused”.

Leave it be, all of you.

OED on the verb leave:

3e. To allow, permit, let. colloq. (chiefly U.S.).
Cf. to leave..be s.v. sense 13.

1840 Southern Lit. Messenger VI. 508/1 If you ha’nt a mind to go, you can leave it be, it’s all one to me.

I will now ask for leave of absence from this thread.

Sounds related to archaic “By your leave” ie asking to be let or allowed permission to do something, or asking for a point about something to be conceded in a discussion?

bayard -

I, too associate the expression “leave go of that” with a working class accent from an industrial area of the UK, but it could also be Cockney.

A quick Google Books search shows that one Abraham Howry Espenshade in The Essentials of English Composition and Rhetoric (page 360) was saying in 1913 that ‘Leave go of, as in “Leave go of me,” is a common provincialism for let go’.

Merriam-Webster has some interesting comments to make about British and American differences over “leave go of” - most Leftpond commentators hate it, Rightponders don’t mind so much ....

The purely Cockney expression involving “leave” is “leave it out” (pronounced “aht"), meaning, normally, “kindly desist from the line of argument/behaviour you are pursuing.

I don’t think it’s purely Cockney - we also hear it in the north.  Also “leave off”, which means the same.