"A Whole Nother" and "Alls I Know Is"

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 10/7/06, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> it's a shame that the OED entry doesn't have any occurrences of "all
> as".  as it stands, we have no record of the putative source for
> "all's"/"alls", though it's likely that someone has looked at the
> history.

There's an instance of "all as" in a cite for "trusten", some
dialectal dialogue from George Eliot's _Silas Marner_:

   1861 GEO. ELIOT Silas M. xvi, All as we've got to do is to trusten.


--Ben Zimmer

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