ahold

[Mark A. Mandel]

I found myself awhile ago arguing with myself on how to spell "get ahold
of". (Nota bene: left to myself, I would have written "a while ago" in the
previous sentence, but the solid spelling was NaturallySpeaking's first
output, and I don't feel strongly enough about that one to bother going back
and correcting it... although, evidently, I do feel strongly enough to put
much more effort into explaining it to you.)

The context was fairly formal, although spoken, the beginning of a
meditation on Yom haShoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day):

 Six million... who can understand six million?
 One or ten we can grasp, a hundred even, but a million? Six million?
 It's an abstraction, it's astronomy or accounting. We can't get ahold of it.

So I felt reluctant to use what looks very much like a misspelling of a
colloquialism, something like "alot" (which I detest) and "alright" (which I
dislike). But unlike Arnold, I'm not comfortable treating this as a count
noun either. I wound up deciding that the expression is, at least for me, an
atomic idiom, no longer equal to the sum of its parts, but that unlike "a
lot" and "all right" (and I have just deleted "alright" from my
NaturallySpeaking vocabulary list), which I am used to seeing, I'm unwilling
to associate the idiomatic meaning with the two-word spelling.

So maybe I'm inconsistent. So sue me.

-- Mark A. Mandel, idiomatically closer to Don Rickles than to Walt Whitman
[This text prepared with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.]