"It goes to"

Jonathan Lighter wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM
Fri Feb 1 19:23:08 UTC 2008


I've been hearing this on Court TV for a dozen years, I'd say.  "This goes to" means "This relates to or addresses."

  I associate it with lawyers.

  JL

Erik Hoover <grinchy at GRINCHY.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Erik Hoover
Subject: "It goes to"
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I was on a business trip this week with my Dallas-born co-worker, and
I noticed his frequent used of a phrase I found unusual: "It goes
to..."

He used it not as one might use "It goes to show you" but more with a
sense of "The gist is"

I Googled a bit for "it goes to the idea", "it goes to the point",
"it goes to the matter"

"it goes to the idea" and "it goes to the matter" are scarce but
produce interesting results.

Here's a two-fer:

"But the whole story? Egad, no. The whole story in Atlanta is too
complex for that. It goes to something more mysterious and ethereal
and, thus, of severely limited value in baseball's statistics-
oriented society. It goes to the idea of multiple minds working
together in some sort of weird harmony, of organizational leaders
being pretty comfortably in sync. You probably can see it more easily
than explain it."

-ESPN columnist Mark Kreider. October 11, 2007.

Is this new, old, regional, spreading, or just an aexample of the
protean utility of the verb 'to go.'?

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