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

[Charles Doyle]

This morning, I find 3,630 Google hits for "Get along to go along" (in quotation marks), including one in a 1997 book about LBJ that actually attributes THAT saying to Sam Rayburn; the earliest in Google Books is (possibly) 1989.  In the form "Get along and go along" there are 4,550 Google hits; Google Books shows a 1971 book that quotes Julian Bond as saying it, and there's an apparent instance from a 1968 publication. "If you want to go along, get along" gets a small number of hits.

This is probably not an example of what Wolfgang Mieder has called "antiproverbs"--ironic adaptations or parodies or jocular misapplications of proverbs (common in cartoons and commercial advertising, as well as playful oral discourse), which sometimes enter oral tradition as proverbs in their own right--but rather a simple misquotation of the proverb, probably based on an unconscious reanalysis. In my judgmetn, "Get along and (to) go along" is now itself a proverb.

--Charlie
_____________________________________________________________

---- Original message ----
>Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2008 17:44:03 -0400
>From: Doug_Harris <cats22 at STNY.RR.COM>
>Subject: Revisiting 'To Get Along, Go Along" And Variations on Same
>
>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