Gone Ahead and Loaded
Posted by Neal on April 15, 2011
One Sunday morning, Doug finished his waffles and bacon, and began to clear his dishes. As it happened, I had just finished taking the clean dishes out of the dishwasher a few minutes earlier, so I figured Doug could go ahead and load his dirty dishes in there.
That’s right, go ahead and load his dirty dishes. Here and there I’ve heard complaints about the go ahead and locution, on the grounds that it adds unnecessary extra words. The one I saw most recently was from one of Grammar Girl’s listeners, who was quoted in this episode on wordiness and idioms. My opinion is that these words do add some extra meaning. Dave Wilton, author of Word Myths, agreed, writing in a comment on Grammar Girl’s website,
In the case of “go ahead and…” the extra words, depending on the context, emphasize intentionality, emphasize futurity, and the imply that the action is going to be taken without further notice or permission.
The subject also came up in this 1996 thread on alt.usage.english, where Lee Jones wrote,
I think it’s a subtle attempt to imply that the speaker is/was moving the state of things forward.
The connotation I’ve picked up from it is that the action is one that some might think is premature or risky, and go ahead and means, “decide that we have sufficiently considered the risks and can now take action.” My wife likes to use it when she’s talking about spending some money on something expensive. The trouble, and this is where the complainers have a point, is that many people don’t pick up that nuance, and for them, go ahead and really is just three words that don’t add anything.
So anyway, I figured Doug could go ahead and put his dishes in the dishwasher. I gestured to them and said,
The dishwasher’s empty, so those can be gone ahead and loaded.
Be gone ahead and loaded? Where did I get that? I realized that although go ahead and do it can be put into the past tense (went ahead and did it), there really isn’t a good way to put it in the passive voice. I went with putting both go ahead and load into the passive voice, even though it makes no sense to put go ahead into the passive voice by itself, as in *it was gone ahead. Another option to try would have been to put just load in the passive voice, but that sounds pretty bad too:
… *so those can be go ahead and loaded.
So I ended up with gone ahead and loaded. Meanwhile, Doug was going ahead and loading his dishes, and it occurred to me that I could have cut him some slack. This was the morning that he had gotten up on his own instead of being shaken awake at 10:00 or later, had done his homework before having breakfast without my even knowing he was out of bed, and cooking that bacon and toasting that waffle all on his own. All that responsibility-taking, and all I could say was, “Those can be gone ahead and loaded”? I should have just let him leave his dishes on the counter like usual.
Besides, when anyone but me loads the dishwasher, they do it wrong, and I have to take out the dishes and reload them.