Talk:go pee

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process.

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

---

go pee

go poop

This seems SoP. You can also go sit, go drive, go sleep, go swim in the water... —CodeCat 00:38, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

It seems that way, but not to a native speaker: go is such a syntactically-complex word that it's easy to mistake one type of construction for another. I can't put my finger on the exact difference, but a clue is what happens when you omit the other verb: If a little boy says "I've got to go right now!", you can be pretty sure he's not talking about swimming or sleeping. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:40, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Then that seems like a sense of go. —CodeCat 12:18, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I agree (w/CodeCat) — and so does our entry for go (see verb sense #41). —Ruakh_TALK 12:30, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Comment. I would find *"went sit", *"went drive", etc. to be ungrammatical, but our entries claim — and b.g.c. searches support this — that people do say "went pee" and "went poop". Likewise, for me the "go" in "go swim", "go drive", etc. actually contributes some semantics of going (I'd never say something like "I plan to get into the pool, then go swim for a while, then get out"), whereas google books:"go pee" finds some uses where I'm pretty sure it just means "pee". That said, I'm comparing the way that I use your example expressions to the way that some people use "go pee" — I would never say *"went pee", and to me "go pee" implies going — so it's possible that the only difference is between me and said people, not between "go pee" and those other expressions. (Also, even if this difference does exist between "go pee" and those other expressions, it doesn't necessarily mean that "go pee" is an idiom, though personally I would view it as one.) —Ruakh_TALK 12:30, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

I previously speedily deleted go poop as not dictionary material. I stand by that. It's a sense of go as in "I want to go talk to my ex", "I wanted to go tell my ex to fuck off". Mglovesfun (talk) 14:34, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Your comment is indented like a reply to mine, but it seems to studiously ignore what I wrote. Would you ever say "I went talk to my ex", "I went tell my ex to fuck off"? —Ruakh_TALK 14:44, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

You're correct, I haven't read any comments, I just tacked mine on the bottom with +1 colon to avoid confusion of both comments being by the same editor. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:46, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Delete. I don't even have to go ponder this. I'm going to go check that we have the appropriate sense of (deprecated template usage) go after I go read what Huddleston and Pullum went and wrote in CGEL. DCDuring TALK 18:41, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Keep, then, because I'm annoyed that the would-be deleters haven't even read the entry before commenting. ;-)   —Ruakh_TALK 19:05, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm. I can come up with a few readings of this. Most interestingly, grammatically, it seems to me that (deprecated template usage) pee and (deprecated template usage) poop could be read as nouns as much as (deprecated template usage) potty in (deprecated template usage) go potty. DCDuring TALK 19:08, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Also, note the numerous childish expressions: go beddy-bye, go sleep-sleep, go nighty-night, go night-night, go bye-bye, go walk-walk. In some cases (deprecated template usage) go seems to serve as if an auxiliary. This seems to be a crude learner's grammar with the complement of (deprecated template usage) go needing to be a repeating sound to indicate a continuing state or activity. DCDuring TALK 19:21, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

"Go" seems to have a range of "light" uses, where its main purpose seems to be to fulfill English's requirement that clauses have tensed verbs. For example:

• It can introduce a quotation: "Well, one day Johnny's teacher decided to do that, so she goes, 'Okay, class, I have something behind my back, and it's long and green. What is it?'"
• It can introduce a gesture: "So, she goes like this. (swings arm forward), and I go, and I duck, from the _______, I duck and […] "
• It can introduce a sound effect, as in "it just went 'plop'".
• It can appear in sentences like "How's it going?", "Things are going well at work", etc., where I think it's just a place to hang an adverb.
• It can introduce an adjective with negative valence, as in "he went crazy", "she went slack-jawed", etc. There it effectively means "become", but I think it's still semantically light, with the "become" meaning being a result of the aspect that it provides (compare "get", and contrast "be").

• As a special case: go native, go Hollywood, etc.

• It's used in various childish idioms, as you mention, and I think go pee and go poop ultimately derive from that.

All of these expressions can be analyzed as SOP by using senses that are or can be at [[go#Verb]], but such senses can't do always a good job of explaining which words "go" actually ends up collocating with. "Go crazy" is fine, but ?"go unhappy" is bizarre. "Go Hollywood" is well attested, but ?"go Wall Street" is not. Why?

—Ruakh_TALK 20:00, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

One can go also Beltway, Broadway, Main Street, Seventh Avenue, Greenwich Village, Nashville, Washington, Beverly Hills, Palm Beach, Las Vegas. All these toponyms seem to convey a kind of fashion/entertainment/political style. (And all of them should be included in the non-encyclopedic dictionary I would like Wiktionary to be.) DCDuring TALK 22:25, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

And Madison Avenue. DCDuring TALK 22:31, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

@Ruakh: For the light-verb uses, CGEL includes go among the verbs that can be used to report speech and other performances.

In "How's it going?", it is very much like hanging, coming, progressing, doing, looking, shaking, than any of which it is certainly more common.

All the synonyms of crazy work, including most of the similes, but also bad and wrong and synonyms, and color adjectives and color NPs. These are not set phrases as adverbs can intervene. There are lots of other adjectives that work with go, though not every adjective seems natural. ("Now, don't go all lexicographic on me." seems silly, but not wrong.) DCDuring TALK 23:54, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Potty in go potty seems locative. In much reported (or imagined?) pidgin speech go occurs with a bare noun complement where a native English speaker would say go to. Go in go pee, go pee-pee, go poo, and go poop seems to me to the sense of go in "He went in his pants" with the nouns introducing a finer discrimination. The contrast between go pee and go piss is possibly telling. In the second case the sense of go is certainly "go away and". DCDuring TALK 23:54, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

FWIW I've always understood this (with nothing to back me up beyond my being a native speaker with a soupcon of intelligence) as being go + noun, with go light and transitive, meaning something like "do": not the same as in go potty (where I think it means "travel to a destination", with missing to the) or in go in his pants (where it means "defecate or urinate").​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:09, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

It would be easy for me to agree with your reading were it not for the sense of go in "go in one's pants". Another reading is that go has a function of reporting an action. I have the recurring desire to call pee and poop adverbs in this construction, though that seems completely unjustifiable. DCDuring TALK 18:31, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Delete. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 02:03, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

deleted -- Liliana • 08:36, 13 October 2012 (UTC)

hmm

Well, it occurred to me that the sentence Go [go potty]! might be grammatical, but things like *go go swim never are. Because in the first example, there's two different senses of go, but in the second, it's just the same verb twice. And I'd think go pee would pattern with go potty rather than go swim in allowing another preceding "go". That would seem to provide an argument for restoration of this page and others alongside the still-listed go potty. But I'm not sure about this, so I'll sit on it. —Soap— 11:59, 18 June 2023 (UTC)