came very much in handy

James Harbeck jharbeck at SYMPATICO.CA
Sun Nov 16 05:17:43 UTC 2008


I overheard my wife on the phone saying "Your certificate came very
much in handy." A Google check of "came very much in handy" gets 1160
hits. I find it quite interesting in the way it attaches the "in" to
"handy" rather than "came" -- to my ears, a rough syntactic analog of
morphological splits such as "a whole nother."

James Harbeck.

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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