You can say, "I was going", meaning, "I was saying". So the dialect, "I was agate", isn't far off if "agate" means "going" and "going" means "saying". Right?
Are you following this? I shall be asking questions later.
When I was little there was one game we played, and I can't for the life of me remember what it was, that started with a rhyme. The only bit of this rhyme I remember is the last line, just as the kids run off to actually play the game, and it was, "If you're ready, get agate". It sticks in my mind particularly as it took me a long time to work out what "get agate" meant but it meant "get going".
