"good to go"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Nov 1, 2004, at 8:12 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> I first heard this during TV coverage of Operation Desert Shield in
> late 1990.  It's become very common on TV and in real life.
>
> Seems to be a blend of "We're good" (recent colloq. for "we're fine")
> and "We're ready to go."

or possibly an extension of the impersonal "It's good (for us) to go"
'It's fine (for us) to go; we're ready to go; we should go' to the
personal "We're good to go" (with a similar range of meanings).
similar shifts have been taking place in english for centuries.

on a related topic: i had the very strong impression that this shift
had also taken place (for some speakers) for some second verbs other
than "go", in particular "talk".  that is, i thought that in addition
to "It's good to talk" 'Talking is good' (as in the title of deborah
cameron's book Good to Talk?), i'd heard "I'm good to talk" 'I'm ready
to talk' and similar things.  but a google search on
   "good to talk" -to
(designed to filter out the pretty common "good to talk to") got no
hits at all, web or groups.  so maybe it was all an illusion.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)