ahold

[James Smith]

I and those around me have used "ahold" as long as I
can remember, more often spoken than written, but when
written it has been one word rather than two.

e.g., "Get ahold of Broderick over at the shop and see
how that order's coming."



--- FRITZ JUENGLING
<juengling_fritz at SALKEIZ.K12.OR.US> wrote:

> How 'bout  "for awhile"? Does that bother you?
> Fritz J
>
> >>> zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU 06/10/05 07:42PM >>>
> 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)
>


James D. SMITH                 |If history teaches anything
South SLC, UT                  |it is that we will be sued
jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com     |whether we act quickly and decisively
                               |or slowly and cautiously.



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