Register and tone

Il va sans dire sits in the polite middle of this list, and the English phrase facing it is not really an English phrase at all. « It goes without saying » is a loan translation: cela va sans dire was carried into English in the nineteenth century piece by piece — cela as « it », va as « goes », sans dire as « without saying » — and it settled in as a single fixed lump. That is why it will not come apart. Nothing else in English « goes without » doing something, and the verb « to go » is doing a job here that it does nowhere else in the language. In French the same construction is ordinary rather than frozen: aller sans plus an infinitive is open to other sentences, and the impersonal il of this list’s entry alternates freely with cela at no cost to the meaning. The home-grown English phrase for the same idea is the older « needless to say », and on a page about register that difference is the whole point: the borrowed phrase sits a shade higher than the one that was always there.