Gone and V-ed

[Johanna N Franklin]

    It does mean that he did "drown his dinner in syrup."  The
connotation is that he did something wrong, as in

Can you believe that he just went and wrote that letter without telling me?
That cat of yours has gone and destroyed my couch.

    I'm more used to hearing it as "...went and...," obviously, but I
have heard "gone" too (growing up in southern Illinois, rather rural).
This construction was mainly used to discuss someone doing something bad.

    Johanna, who wants UPS to stop by and pick up her defective monitor

Excerpts from mail: 7-Nov-100 Gone and V-ed by Salikoko Mufwene at MIDWAY.
> Can anybody paraphrase the following construction:
>
>        But he's gone and drowned his dinner in syrup.
>
> It occurs in Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD in the following context:
>
>     Atticus shook his head at me again. "But he's gone and drowned his dinner
> in syrup," I protested. "He's poured it all over --"
>
> A southern student in my "Dialect Voices in Literature" class suggested that
> "gone and" is equivalent to PERFECT "done" in this construction. However,
> another southern student said she was not familiar with it. My
> African-American
> student had no clue either. The rest of white American students in the class
> had no idea. Can anybody on this list enlighten us?