There are elements of speech that are characterized as “slang” or “colloquial” and resolutely eschewed by educated speakers (like Y-H-B) but are in common use. Such is the phrase “from the get/git-go” that seems to have originated in Black English but is now uttered by American speakers regardless of race. Whatever its origins (disputed by etymologists), this phrase has an emotional force that its neutral counterpart, “from the (very) beginning/start,” lacks, owing to the paronomastic frame constituted by the conjoined words “get” and “go.” Paronomasia––here represented by the typical English case of alliteration––always accentuates the emotive content of whatever is being uttered by foregrounding the playful function of language at the expense of the purely referential. The paronomastic duple “get-go” is the emphatic means equivalent to the single word “very” in its neutral counterpart. Meaning achieved by indirection (the core of linguistic ontogeny) always has a power that its direct semantic counterpart lacks.

MICHAEL SHAPIRO