Further To-Do About Going, Saying and All
My exploration of a recent aberration of the young--use of the verb to go as a synonym for to say-- seems to have divided readers into those who applaud or condone such novelties and those who deplore them.
The usage is, or was, common in casual conversation. An example offered by Kenneth Green, counselor at Cal Poly Pomona: “So when he told me he had to break our date, I go, ‘Look, I’m getting tired of being treated like this.’ He goes, ‘I can’t help it.’ ”
Tom Downer Jr. of Manhattan Beach affirms the observation of his friend, Bob Brigham, that the usage is already obsolete; Downer says it has been replaced by the even more deplorable use of all as a verb meaning to say.
“Where this came from I have no idea,” he says. “ All isn’t even a verb, nor does it imply any sort of communication, either among humans or any species of birds of which I am aware.”
I must say I doubted Downer’s report, but it is corroborated, with examples, by Jean Ainsworth of Thousand Oaks. “The current usage,” she says, “has deteriorated to ‘I’m all,’ which a young person uses to describe what she, or another, is saying or feeling.”
To paraphrase the student and her dating woes, she says, the exchange would go: “So when he told me he had to break our date, I’m all, ‘Look, I’m getting tired of being treated like this.’ He’s all, ‘I can’t help it.’ I’m all, ‘This is the last time he is ever going to do this to me.’ ”
Mrs. Ainsworth says this bizarre use of all has “trickled down” from high school to the lower grades. She says it exasperates her when she hears her 9-year-old and even her 5-year-old use all that way. “I freak out. I’m all, like, frustrated to the max, you know?”
Marshall H. Marlow thinks we infect our children by teaching them that “a doggie goes bow-wow and a kitty goes meow “ (and a cuckoo bird goes cuckoo ) “and they have extrapolated from that into today’s free-wheeling use of go for say .” (Poor Marlow evidently doesn’t even know about all yet.)
“Please fight this thing, Jack,” he says. “For my part, I give warning here and now that I won’t tolerate anyone messing with a favorite old Irving Berlin lyric. I’m saving a brick for the first person who sings: ‘Go It Isn’t So!’ ”
On the other hand, 22-year-old writer Darrin Navarro of La Palma scorns David J. Flood’s plea for me “and other columnists of your ilk . . . to keep the language pure and devoid of youthful aberrations.”
“Wake up, folks!” he says. “The language evolves. The current state of English, which Flood would like to keep ‘pure,’ is a chaotic mass of foreign influence, street slang that’s been elevated into mainstream use and, to no small degree, youthful aberrations that survive even when their originators are no longer so youthful.”
Everyone who has ever turned a page of Chaucer knows that the language evolves, and that it is strengthened by slang and foreign borrowings; but it is odd that laissez-faire linguists who affect contempt for the rules almost always observe them in their own prose, as Navarro has.
“It’s not that I don’t know the rules,” he says, “or that I never use them. I just know the joy of breaking them, when to do so works.” (It is an astute writer indeed who knows when that is.)
Navarro also argues that a young person would say: “When he told me he had to break our date, I went “ . . . not go . “To assume that the speakers would screw up the tense betrays his (Green’s) lack of respect for the younger set and our speech. These are intelligent, well-spoken young people who speak this way. In this case, and in a whole lotta others, the term’s common usage is its own justification.”
I’m sure Navarro hears more teen speech than I do, but I have often heard the verb go used for say , and I have never heard any tense but the present. If the rules are to be broken, what’s the point of respecting the tenses?
Anyway, this is a lotta fun, ain’t it?
