William Safire, “On Language: Vogue Words” (New York Times, Mar. 11, 2007)
“Go figure it out,” Robert Stack sighed, one Erskine Johnson reported in a column that appeared in The Walla Walla Union Bulletin on June 10, 1953. “After ‘The Bullfighter and the Lady,’ which was a great prestige picture, I didn’t work for a year. ‘Bwana Devil,’ panned by everybody in Hollywood, did the trick for me.”
Benjamin Zimmer, editor for American dictionaries at Oxford University Press, passed that citation around the American Dialect Society more than two years ago. He informs me that “‘go figure’ seems to have originated as a shorter form of such expressions as ‘go figure it out’ and ‘you go figure it,’ both of which date to the 1950s.” Then shortening took place, and by the 1970s we had go figure. Now that phrase is rampant.
Read the rest here.