Revisiting 'To Get Along, Go Along" And Variations on Same

[Doug_Harris]

Pretty much the point I was making. That and the fact that by shifting
the 'to' from its original position (To get along, go along) to the
middle of the phrase (Get along to go along) _entirely_ alters the meaning
to the point the speaker seems, in the second instance, to be saying not
what they meant to say but something altogether different.
dh

on 9/4/08 5:44 PM, Doug_Harris at cats22 at STNY.RR.COM wrote:
> Back on January 4, '07, a discussion here cited Sam Rayburn as
> having coined the phrase "To get along, go along." As sometimes
> happens with such phrases, a reversed version has been assumed
> by some speakers -- "Get along to go along", one example, also
> from 2007, was quoted today by Rosa Brooks in the LA Times.
> The article, entitled 'Palin's secession flirtation,' offered
> this:
> "[Alaska Independence Party] Vice Chairman Dexter Clark describing Palin
at
> the 2007 North American Secessionist Convention as an 'AIP member before
she
> got the job as a mayor of a small town -- that was a nonpartisan job. But
> you get along to go along. She eventually joined the Republican Party,
where
> she had all kinds of problems with their ethics, and well, I won't go into
> that.'"
> .
> _Go along to get along_ gets 90,300 Google hits. _Get along to go along_
> gets 23 million plus hits when the phrase is NOT in quote. That includes
> instances of the phrase the other way around. When 'go along to get along'
> is IN quotes, a mere 693 hits are recorded.
> --
> 'Go along to . . .' is comparable, in terms of how much sense it makes, to
> "far and few between," another back-to-front formation of a sensible
> phrase that I hear surprisingly often here in Central New York.
> The Google comparison on those two 'far' phrases is 3,110,000 for the
> correct version, 310,000 for the backward one.
> dh
>
~~~~~~~~~
"Correct" one?  "Go along to get along"  is the formulation that makes the
most sense: compromise (sell out, if need be) to stay in the game.
"Get along to go along" can hardly mean more than: be agreeable to make the
journey easier.
AM

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