ir

"To go" — and, with a + infinitive, the standard way to talk about the near future: voy a comer, "I'm going to eat," exactly like French aller. Highly irregular in the present tense (voy, vas, va...), worth learning as its own small set before anything else.

• Voy al mercado. — I'm going to the market.
• Vamos a salir esta noche. — We're going to go out tonight.
• ¿Cómo te va? — How's it going?

Forgetting the obligatory a before the infinitive in the near-future construction — it's voy a comer, never *voy comer*; dropping that a is one of the most common beginner slips.

• politics "¡Que se vayan todos!" — The rallying cry of Argentina's December 2001 economic-crisis protests — cacerolazo demonstrators spread the fuller chant "que se vayan todos, que no quede ni uno solo" ("they all must go, not one of them left") nationwide after December 19–20, 2001, demanding the resignation of the entire political class.
• expression "Irse por las ramas" — A common fixed expression for avoiding the main point of a conversation by wandering into side details — literally "to go off along the branches," the Spanish equivalent of English's "to beat around the bush."