go

go

1. The noun has the plural form goes.

2. There are six uses of the verb that call for comment (these apply also to the current past form went, a form of the verb wend which replaced the cognate past forms of go from about 1500):

a) it goes without saying. This is a naturalized Gallicism (see Gallicisms), from French cela va sans dire. Native English equivalents are needless to say, of course, and others, which some people prefer.

b) go + bare infinitive. The construction go + infinitive without to was the primary construction until the 17c, occurring many times in Shakespeare (e.g.

He is walked up to the top of the hill. I'll go seek him —1 Henry IV ii.ii.10)

. Although this construction survives in AmE (e.g.

I'll go put your lovely flowers in water —John Updike, 1986

), in BrE it is now confined to a few fixed expressions such as let him go hang (for all I care). In BrE the current constructions are go + and + infinitive or go + to-infinitive:

Let's go and see that film at the local —K. Benton, 1976

/

She…said she would go and turn the sprinkler off herself —New Yorker, 1986

/

I went to buy some milk and a group began chanting my name while they banged some tins together —People, 2005

.

c) go + and. The combination go + and + infinitive often has special meanings, e.g. (1) ‘to be so foolish, unreasonable, or unlucky as to’:

You herd cattle all day, you come to despise them, and pretty soon…you have gone and shot one —Garrison Keillor, 1990

, and (2) as an instruction in the imperative:

It's late, child…Go and get some sleep —J. M. Coetzee, SAfrE 1977

.

d) go = say. The use in question here is illustrated by the following example:

Butch and I were discussing this problem, and Butch goes, ‘But you promised you'd do it.’ Then I go, ‘Well, I changed my mind.’ —Chicago Tribune, 1989

. Go is always used in this way with past reference (though very often in the present tense, as here). It may be regarded as an extension of the meaning that refers to a thing making a sound, as in cows going moo and bells going dong, and a transitional stage between names of sounds and reported speech can be discerned in the evidence given by the OED (Additions Series II, 1993):

He was roused by a loud shouting of the post-boy on the leader. ‘Yo-yo-yo-yo-yoe,’ went the first boy. ‘Yo-yo-yo-yoe,’ went the second —Dickens, 1836

/

She was a dear little dickey bird, ‘Chip, chip, chip,’ she went —Illustrated Victorian Songbook, 1895

. The extended use in reported speech is especially common in school and youth language, and is also heard in conversational adult use.

e) go for it. In 1987, the (American) cox of the Oxford boat in the University Boat Race wore a shirt with the slogan Go for it displayed on the back, thereby signalling the arrival in Britain of this popular American phrase of the 1980s: I told her about Scott [sc. a boyfriend].

Eileen said, ‘Go for it, Andrea!’ —New Yorker, 1986

. It may be seen as an extension of the meaning of go illustrated by uses such as go for someone (or something) in a big way, i.e. ‘be enthusiastic about, be enamoured of’:

He [Prometheus] had defied the established order, so people like Blake, Byron and Shelley went for him in a big way —Scotsman, 2005

.

f) don't go there is a forceful or even aggressive warning to the person addressed to avoid a subject. The idiom, first recorded in the 1990s, is vivid but highly informal:

Don't talk about my childhood. Don't even go there. You know nothing! —fiction website, AmE 2004

[OEC].