stunning antedating

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

joel wallenberg writes from the university of pennsylvania with a
stunning antedating of the GoToGo construction that some -- a
minority of -- english speakers have.  i'm away from these (hard-
copy) files, but the earliest examples david denison had found was
around 1920.  and now:

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from a column Mark Twain wrote for the paper the San Francisco
Morning Call, August 7, 1864:

"This was a touching allusion to his repeated assertions, made at
divers and sundry times during the past few years, that he was going
off immediately and commit suicide."
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[the "going" here is, effectively, a telescoping of "going to go",
and conveys both the prospective sense of "go" and the motion sense.]

that's getting it back about fifty years.

arnold, who has this construction in his variety but understands it's
a minority taste

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