It’s so easy for us Americans to conjugate most verbs. Look at these common ones:
Today, I walk; yesterday, I walked; I have walked many times.
Today, I travel; yesterday, I travelled; I have travelled many times.
But then there’s “Today, I GO; yesterday I WENT; I have GONE many times.”
Because most of you, like me, were born into our language, we never pay much attention to such weird departures from the grammatical norm. Why isn’t it “Today I go, yesterday I goed, I have goed many times”?
Who knows? Well, I could tell you, but it’d be too boring to keep you reading this essay, in the same way that it’s boring to remind you that “gone” is the past participle of “I go.” Besides, my interest here is not in grammar.
My interest is only in the word “gone.”
Whereas almost all other past participles never stray from their part of speech as a verb, “gone” is far more popular and interesting as an adjective. Notice how essential it is as the opening adjective in the title of what is probably the most popular American novel ever written — Gone With The Wind.
With its single-syllable brevity, it also functions nicely in short, pithy sayings, such as “Here today, gone tomorrow.” And that reminds me of my favorite definition of a bore: “Here today, here tomorrow.”
As an adjective, “gone” can simply be defined as “no longer there.” But, oh my, the workout we give that simple definition with so many widely different uses of this pliant little word:
I could swear I had mayo in the fridge; where’s it gone?
Is it still noon? No, actually, it’s gone one o’clock.
When is her baby due? Oh, she’s already five months gone.
Didn’t he die recently? No, he’s long gone.
It’s that final use of “gone” as “dead” that gave early Americans a chance to add a colorful new twist to this versatile adjective and even turn it into a noun.
In the early 1800s, the U.S. had broken free of its original thirteen colonies that hugged the East Coast and had expanded Westward. Those Western-bound pioneers were a rowdy lot, and staid Easterners coined the new territories the “Wild West”. But as opposed to a century later, when that term referred to states west of the Rockies, in 1820 it meant states west of the Alleghenies: Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Missouri. These “coonskin cousins”, as they were derisively labeled by New England snobs, added colorful slang terms to American English like “goldarn it”, “what in tarnation?”, and “skedaddle”.
My favorite slang term from this period arose when pioneer settlers engaged in bitter feuds and settled matters with pistol duels in the “Western” woods. A Missouri settler wrote in his journal that before he shot and killed his hated opponent, he looked him coolly in the eye and said: ”You’re a goner!” It is the first recorded use of that vivid new noun.
I still remember as a kid running through our living room one day, which was strictly verboten. I tripped and knocked over my mother’s favorite vase and watched, stunned, as it shattered before my eyes. Fortunately, Mom wasn’t home, but — just my luck — my tattletale sister saw me do it and, with evil delight, exclaimed: “When Mom comes home, you’re a goner!” I’d never heard the word before, but my back end must have instinctively divined its meaning, because it was already feeling spanked.
Come to think of it, we are all goners, of the “here today” variety. The preciousness of life resides, of course, in the realization that it must end. Living isn’t just existing, in the sense of inanimate objects that occupy a space. Living is a journey with a definite conclusion; living is the going and going and going part. And so “goner,” for all it ominously implies, has the positive connotation of still moving forward. We may all be goners, but we ain’t gone yet. Just because we know where our one-way street is headed doesn’t mean we can’t find infinite joy in our daily steps.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here