ahold

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

You learn something every day...

The New Yorker, famously careful about both facts and usage, printed
the following, in Elizabeth Kolbert's Letter from Alaska: "Last
words: A language dies" (about Eyak), 6 June 2005, p. 59:

-----
The project was largely the work of a former TV reporter from
Anchorage named Laura Bliss Spaan.  She first heard about the Eyak in
1992, when she was sent to Cordova to cover the Ice Worm Festival.
"When Eyak gets ahold of you, it's really hard to escape," she
explained to me.
-----

The "ahold" caught my eye.

The OED treats the relevant idiom as "get (a) hold of", though it has
some cites for the spellings "a-hold" and "ahold".  MWDEU notes that
verbs other than "get" are possible ("catch" and "take", for
instance) and that when the preposition following "hold" is anything
other than "of", the "a" is required:
   get a hold over / *get hold over
   catch a hold on/*catch hold on
(my examples), but that "V hold of" does not have "a", "in the idiom
of the majority of English speakers and writers from Shakespeare to
the present" (p. 59).  "Since the late 19th century, the minority
idiom with "a" seems to have been gaining in respectability, but it
is still primarily a spoken rather than a written form."

The version with "a" doesn't sound at all colloquial/nonstandard/etc.
to *me*, and when "hold" is modified the "a" is required:
   get a firm/quick/tenuous/... hold of
  *get firm/quick/tenuous/... hold of

In any case, what really caught my eye was the *spelling*: "ahold"
rather than "a hold".  Since the "a" here seems pretty clearly to be
the indefinite article, the spelling "ahold" strikes me as similar to
the spelling "alot" for "a lot".  Consequently, my first reading of
the quote from Spaan was that Kolbert was using eye dialect --
representing Spaan as the sort of person who would spell "a hold of"
as "ahold of".  In the context, that seemed gratuitous.

Then I thought that maybe this was one (presumably from Kolbert
herself) that just got past the copy editors.

But then I checked out MWDEU and discovered piles of examples of
"ahold" from quoted speech.  In fact, MWDEU maintains: "When
transcribed from speech, [the idiom] is generally styled as one word,
_ahold_."

Well, I didn't know that.  It still looks odd to me.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)