To Boldly Go:

N^o 1 Smile

One summer afternoon, a couple of years ago, I found myself doing something uncharacteristic: drawing the shades and dimming the lights to watch a bootleg copy of Smile (2022).

Horror films aren't my wheelhouse, but something about it caught my interest. There's one scene in particular that I'd call a real standout - an unsettling encounter that the protagonist, Rose, has with a man named Carl:

You can also see an abbreviated version of this scene in the film's official trailer. What I find interesting is that the trailer loops that line of dialogue—"you're going to die"—playing it over and over across footage from other scenes. It's a deliberate echo of the way Carl repeats that line in the original scene, and it's the exact thing I would point to if I had to say why that scene was so impactful.

But what makes "you're going to die" so ominous?

N^o 2 The many meanings of go

The scene works because, in context, "you're going to die" feels very much like a threat. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Does it? Sure, Smile is a horror film. That colors our interpretation. But it could be more like a warning: something along the lines of "you'll shoot your eye out," as Ralphie's mother keeps telling him throughout A Christmas Story (1983). And, as Carl points out in his earlier line of dialogue, "everybody dies." If everybody's going to die someday, why does the line read like a threat? Why not just a neutral statement of fact?

It all hinges on the middle of that line: going to. As it turns out, that little bit of grammar is doing some heavy lifting here. Be going to—or, if you're in a hurry, gonna—is a workhorse of the English language. We use it all the time. We can be going to the store, going to write a novel, or going to get cold if we don't wear a jacket. But that wasn't always the case. Believe it or not, there was a time when even an everyday sentence like "sorry, I'm going to be late" would have made your fellow English-speakers scrunch their eyebrows in confusion. This innocuous little phrase only has so many uses today because it spent centuries evolving to be that way, on a journey spanning centuries, with multiple twists and turns.

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