going dead, getting dead

[Laurence Horn]

Beverly Flanigan wrote yesterday:

>I haven't heard this one, but I heard something else new (to me) the other
>night, on "Law and Order" (which I watched for the first time and just "on
>accident"):  A young girl accused of murder said of her victim, "He just
>went dead"--as if on accident.  I'm reminded of the old "He up and died,"
>also as if accidentally.  Is "went dead" familiar to others?

I haven't heard "go dead" for people (or animals), but after reading this
post yesterday I came across a couple of occurrences of "get(ting) dead" in
Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye--perhaps significantly, another
hard-boiled detective context, like Law and Order.  As for "go dead", it
may be partly an extension from inanimate things that go dead all the time,
especially batteries, but it also reflects a more general pattern of coming
and going discussed by Eve Clark (in a paper in Language from the early
'60's) and others:  "come X" is used for return to unmarked states and/or
states characterized by people, while "go X" is used for entering marked
states.  So balloons go up and come (back) down, divers go down and come
(back) up, people go (and not come) crazy or bananas, fruit goes bad or
rotten, things come (and not go) loose, open, undone, unglued (restoring
them to their original state), and so on.  Guns go off, but knobs (having
been fastened on) come off.  So it's motivated that people can (at least
metaphorically) come alive, while batteries and perhaps now people can go
(not come) dead.

larry
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