Everyday Expressions: Going To
Our language is full of hidden metaphors. They’re fun to discover, and knowing them helps you use the language more effectively.
Consider ‘going to’ as a substitute for future tense, as in: “We’re going to do better this year.” When is ‘going to’ superior to the future tense of “We will do better this year”? Either is acceptable, but which is better?
Sometimes one simply sounds better than the other. “We will win” is an awkward sentence with three ‘W’s lined up, so “We’re going to win” comes off much better. But if euphony doesn’t decide the question, then I suggest looking to the underlying metaphor.
In a sense, ‘going to’ isn’t really a metaphor. If you hear the doorbell and someone says, “I’m going to answer the door,” then you could hear that sentence two different ways: 1) I will answer the door at some point in the future, or 2) I am physically moving across the house towards the door for the purpose of answering it. The ‘going to’ can be entirely literal, and I suspect that that’s the phrase’s origin. If you must travel before performing action X, then action X will necessarily occur sometime in the future, after the travelling is complete.
So ‘going to’ ought to work better when there’s some travel involved. If you say, “I’m going to think about it,” then that should be slightly inferior to the future tense, because you don’t need to travel to think—unless you actually plan to leave your current location and find some place for quiet reflection. The travel can be metaphorical: “We’re going to cover that next month” can make sense with the common metaphor of time as a journey, especially if you’re using that metaphor elsewhere. However you work it out, it’s better to say that you’re going to do something when you’ll be going somewhere to do it.
Understanding the metaphor will also help avoid awkward expressions like, “We’re going to go find out.” The double ‘go’ emerges because the speaker thinks of ‘going to’ strictly as an expression of future tense, so he adds the second ‘go’ to emphasize that not only will the finding-out take place in the future, but there will be some travel involved before it occurs. When you realize that ‘going to’ already implies travel, then you can simply say “We’re going to find out,” and hit both implications at the same time.