Revisiting 'To Get Along, Go Along" And Variations on Same

[Doug_Harris]

Back on January 4, '07, a discussion here cited Sam Rayburn as
having coined the phrase "To get along, go along." As sometimes
happens with such phrases, a reversed version has been assumed
by some speakers -- "Get along to go along", one example, also
from 2007, was quoted today by Rosa Brooks in the LA Times.
The article, entitled 'Palin's secession flirtation,' offered
this:
"[Alaska Independence Party] Vice Chairman Dexter Clark describing Palin at
the 2007 North American Secessionist Convention as an 'AIP member before she
got the job as a mayor of a small town -- that was a nonpartisan job. But
you get along to go along. She eventually joined the Republican Party, where
she had all kinds of problems with their ethics, and well, I won't go into
that.'"
.
_Go along to get along_ gets 90,300 Google hits. _Get along to go along_
gets 23 million plus hits when the phrase is NOT in quote. That includes
instances of the phrase the other way around. When 'go along to get along'
is IN quotes, a mere 693 hits are recorded.
--
'Go along to . . .' is comparable, in terms of how much sense it makes, to
"far and few between," another back-to-front formation of a sensible phrase
that I hear surprisingly often here in Central New York.
The Google comparison on those two 'far' phrases is 3,110,000 for the
correct version, 310,000 for the backward one.
dh

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org