A Dictionary of Cont..

go
English literature and is standard in the United
States today. But it is no longer standard in
Great Britain, where an and is required between
the two verbs as in go and call the cattle home.
Neither construction can be used when go is a
simple present tense or after any form of the
verb except go. We may say I will go tell her
but not I go tell her or I went tell her. These
forms require a to-infinitive to express purpose.
Went, gone, and the present tense of go, followed
by and, are used before another verb to
show indignation or surprise, as in he went and
told her, he has gone and done it again, now he
goes and gets married. This construction is very
expressive, but it is not standard. When sentences
like this are meant literally (that is, when
the person actually moved), they are acceptable.
But many people take care to break the pattern
in some way, as in he went and he told her and
he went quickly and told her.
The word going, combined with some form
of the verb be, is often used to indicate expectation.
This is a favorite way of making a statement
about the future. Used in this sense, going
is always followed by a to-infinitive, as in Pm
going to build a castle down in Newport. Here
go does not carry any meaning of motion. We
may say Z am going to sit still. When the following
infinitive is to go it may be omitted, as in
I’m going back and tell her which means I am
going to go back and tell her. When going and
some form of the verb be are used to mean
motion they are never followed directly by an
infinitive. We find some way to avoid this pattern,
as in Pm going now to tell her.
Go on may mean continue. When it does, it is
always followed by the -ing form of a verb, as
in go on talking.
Go may be followed by an adjective describing
whatever it is that goes. Sometimes this is
because go is being used as the equivalent of
be or become, as in go mad and it went hard
with him. But it can also happen when go
actually carries the meaning of movement, as in
they go around naked. In this sense go may also
be followed by an adverb describing the going,
as in they go quietly.
go in one ear and out the other. The assurance
that something that has been said has gone in
one ear and out the other is often spoken contemptuously
by the person to whom the remark
was addressed, meaning that he paid no attention
to it. But it is a dangerous sneer because it
carries the suggestion that there was nothing
between the two ears to impede its passage. Even
without such a consideration, however, the
phrase should be avoided.
go the whole hog. Dr. Charles Earle Funk, in
his A Hog on Ice, believes that to go the whole
hog, as an expression for stopping at nothing,
carrying through regardless of cost, making
every effort, supporting wholeheartedly, may
derive from a passage in Cowper’s “The Love
of the World Reproved; or Hypocrisy Detected.”
It may also derive, he grants, from the fact that
a ten-cent piece was once called a “hog” so that
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to go the whole hog was an ironical phrase for
the willingness of the parsimonious to spend
their money in a cause to which they were
devoted. Whatever the origin of the phrase, it
is now overworked and to be avoided.
gobbledegook was a term coined by the late Representative
Maury Maverick to describe the
language, characterized by circumlocution and
jargon, of government reports, questionnaires,
pronouncements and the like, and especially of
inter- and intra-departmental memoranda. He
had in mind such phrases as “cause an investigation
to be made with a view to ascertaining”
for “find out” and “return a considered evaluation”
for “give me your opinion.”
This sort of writing, which seems to have
been begotten upon the legalism of bureaucracy
by the inflated vagueness of social science, is
not peculiar to America. Every modern country
has it and with the increasing part that government
plays in the daily life of every individual
it is a serious burden. Sir Ernest Gowers, himself
a civil servant, speaks in his Plain Words:
Their A B C of “the sense of despair” produced
in the public mind by gobbledegook. The citizen
in dealing with officials feels himself utterly lost
and helpless in a fog of words. This involved
and pompous verbosity, Sir Ernest believes, goes
far to defeat the intention of a great deal of
social legislation.
Various names have been suggested. Ivor
Brown, in England, has offered barnacrrlar and
jarguntuan and pudder (from the reference in
King Lear to the gods that keep this dreadful
pudder o’er our heads), but gobbledegook has
been accepted in the United States and seems to
be on its way to acceptance in England and
other parts of the British Empire. It was a happy
coinage, combining the self-important, indignant,
incomprehensible gobbling of a turkeycock
with the idea of a sticky and loathsome
muck into which the unhappy listener or reader
sinks with a bubbling cry.
George Orwell (“Politics and the English
Language”) translates a passage from Ecclesiastes
into gobbledegook:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the
race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the
strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet
riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor
to men of skill: but time and chance happeneth
to them all
became
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena
compels the conclusion that success
or failure in competitive activities exhibits no
tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity,
but that a considerable element of the
unpredictable must be taken into account.
But admirable as the parody is, Orwell’s sense
of style and the necessity of following the meaning
of the original make it far clearer than most
gobbledegook. Time (May 7, 1947) quotes,
from a letter to a veteran who was inquiring