![]() ![]() “Infant of eight summers-Here you go my boy, but be sure you give me back the right one.” “Old gentleman, full of fun, to infant of eight summers, who is smoking a cigar-Can I trouble you for a light mister? 15, 1885, Daily Yellowstone Journal in Montana) is in a joke about an elderly man asking for a light from a child’s cigar: Here you go,’ and he tipped the two lads handsomely.” (The speaker gives the boys, who have tied in a race, a “five-dollar piece” each.)Īnd this example (from the Oct. “ ‘You’ve both won the heat, race, and money. 25, 1879, issue of the Door County Advocate in Sturgeon Bay, WI.: In the idiomatic expression “here you go,” Fortescue writes, “there is of course nothing left of any of the original meaning of ‘go’ at all.”Īs we’ve said, “here you go” has been used in writing since the 19th century to mean “here it is.” In searches of newspaper databases, the earliest example we’ve found is from a short story in the Dec. Grammaticalization is a process in which lexical terms acquire new grammatical functions over time. In discussing how the verb “go” has evolved in meaning and usage over the years, he says “here you go” reflects “the gradual historical bleaching of the original motion sense of the verb as it gradually became more grammaticalized.” We haven’t seen much linguistic scholarship about the expression, though the British linguist Michael Fortescue comments briefly about “here you go” in Semantix, a 2014 book about semantics and pragmatics. But it’s so common that most of us don’t stop to think about it. Like other idioms, “here you go” is not meant literally and doesn’t even make sense on a literal level. ![]() That’s why an easygoing barista says “here you go” rather than the more formal “here it is” when he hands over your mocha latte. Q: How did “Here you go” come to mean “Here is the thing you wanted”?Ī: “Here you go,” an idiomatic expression that showed up in writing in the 1800s, is a casual way of saying “Here it is” when you give someone something that’s requested.
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