go-along

go-along

See also: go along

English

Noun

go-along (plural go-alongs)

1. An ethnographic method involving meeting and walking with members of the community being studied.
2. (Britain, obsolete, thieves' cant) A person duped into accompanying thieves during a robbery.
   • 2002, Meg Arnot, ‎Cornelie Usborne, Gender And Crime in Modern Europe (page 82)

     A boy called Hewitt, awaiting transportation on the Euryalus hulk in the mid-1830s, told an interviewer that the swell-mob would often call into lodging-houses in order to recruit "go-alongs" for thieving expeditions: "boys are delighted [they] think it an honour to go with a swell-mob".

References

• 1873, John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary: "Go along, a fool, a cully, one of the most contemptuous terms in a thieves' vocabulary."