Antedating of "Get-Go"

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, IMO, the passage of time is sufficient. As far back as 1956, there
were at least two  other, local versions of this still in play, before they
were edged out by "from the git-go": "from the be-go," in East Texas - I was
there for my grandfather's funeral - and "from the be-ginnin'," in St.
Louis.

>From an admittedly-casual examination of the dates associated with BE slang
that I've been familiar with since childhood, it seems to me that it takes,
on *the* average, as was said back in the '40's, from ten to thirty years
for a BE slang term to found in print or to leap the color bar and hundreds
of terms, at least, don't make it. A case in point is that of "break nasty,"
which is not in HDAS, though the slightly more recent and, IMO, much more
pedestrian synonym, "break bad," is.

-Wilson

On 3/16/06, Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Antedating of "Get-Go"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> OED/HDAS's first citation for "get-go" is dated 1966.  Salvatore Volatile
> posted the following to alt.usage.english:
>
> ProQuest gives me a slightly earlier hit, from 1962, in an article by
> Langston Hughes in the _Chicago Defender_:
>
>    "IF I HAD of had had," said Simple, "I would teach them about sex from
>    the get-go, beginning with the first step out of the  cradle, so they
>    would not make a mis-step."
>
> One thing is quite clear:  all the early citations for the phrase have
> some African-American association (for example, the second cite in the OED
> is from Sammy Davis Jr.).
>
> It's possible that sports played a role in the dissemination of the phrase
> to the larger Cooperian public.
>
> [End of Volatile posting]
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
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>    Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
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