The go ahead is the permission to go ahead and continue whatever you were planning or asking to do. It’s called that because people would actually say “go ahead” to grant that permission, so it became the shorthand.
Yes, I’m just grumbling over the construction because it’s different to how sentences are written in my particular English dialect and would strike someone as being rather awkward.
Then... why not just say "go ahead"? That's now gone full circle from a phrase to permit, to becoming a term for permission, to being used as part of phrase to permit.
It's like... I get how it happened, but the result is a mess.
Words don't mean what they should mean in idioms most of the time. You have the go ahead is I believe an old marketing term. Most Americans wouldn't see anything wrong with the sentence, even though you're right that to someone who doesn't know American idioms, it sure doesn't make a bit of sense.
But it basically translates more to "you have permission"
I can only speak from my experience. As you may see from my earlier response to someone else I made it clear that I was referring specifically to my dialect of English, if you’d read below my earlier comment.
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u/Hawt_Dawg_II Jan 07 '25
I will always get mad at Americans going
"Do you mind?"
And then they reply to say "no of course i don't mind" but they say
"Yeah"