Parents reading picture books aloud to their infant children have always used go to produce nonlinguistic noises, as in The train went “toot” and The cow goes “moo.” Now their grown-up infants use go to report speech, as in Then he goes, “You think you’re real smart, don’t you?”.

 For speakers young enough to get away with it, this usage is useful when telling a story that has direct quotations, particularly when the user wishes to mimic the accent or intonation of the original speaker. You should restrict this sense of go, however, to the “narrative present” used in informal speech and omit it from more formal contexts