Olympic-y

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 2/13/06, Michael Adams <madams1448 at aol.com> wrote:
>
> The origin of unexpected -y suffixations like "Olympicy" doesn't seem
> to be tied to "all," but "all nouny" is a frequent collocation --
> CSLI's recent/continuing work on "all" may give us some insight into
> how frequent the collocational pattern is; in any event, my sense is
> impressionistic because there's isn't a corpus to which we can turn for
> reliable contrastive results for "nouny" and "all nouny." When it comes
> to "origin," this type of -y suffixing has been going on much longer
> than "all nouny" or other current colloquial alls; it certainly
> antedates the collocational pattern, though intensive "all" is emergent
> in ninetheenth-century Scots/Ulster Scots "all that."

I see OED2 has this cite under "all" sense C.2c ("to go all --- "):

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1932 S. GIBBONS Cold Comf. Farm v. 71 She will..go all arty-and-crafty.
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--Ben Zimmer

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