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

[sagehen]

on 9/4/08 5:44 PM, Doug_Harris at cats22 at STNY.RR.COM wrote:

> 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
>
~~~~~~~~~
"Correct" one?  "Go along to get along"  is the formulation that makes the
most sense: compromise (sell out, if need be) to stay in the game.
"Get along to go along" can hardly mean more than: be agreeable to make the
journey easier.
AM

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