"how about's"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Oct 8, 2006, at 9:56 AM, Jerry Cohen wrote:

>     Just a guess: Suppose the expression arose wiith "How about
> us...", e.g. "How about us having a pizza before we go home?"
> Then, by shortening of "us" to "'s" in informal speech, "How
> about's having a pizza...?"
>
>      Once  "How about's" arose in this context, it could spread to
> other contexts.

this is an imaginable history, but not a very plausible one.  to
start with "how about's Ving..." seems to be very rare indeed: no
google webhits for "having", "taking", "giving", or "eating" ("how's
about Ving...", on the other hand, gets modest numbers of hits for
the first three of these verbs, and one for the last).

and then there are differences in the frequencies of the various
verbal complements for suggestion "how about": for "how about VPing",
"how about Sing" (where Sing is a clause with accusative subject and
VPing predicate), and "how about Sfin" (where Sfin is a finite
clause, in the present tense):

How about treating yourself to dessert?  How about treating ourselves
to dessert?

How about you/him finishing your work?  How about us finishing our work?

How about I/we treat you to dessert?

(there are also nominal complements, as in "How about dessert?")

my impression is that the first of these is by far the most frequent
and the second the least frequent.  but only the second could serve
as the basis for the contraction jerry proposes -- and then only in
the first person plural (though all persons and numbers are possible).

(note: this is my impression, but i don't think anyone's studied the
relative frequencies.)

now several people have pointed out that there are in fact three
variants:
   how's about
   how about's
   how's about's
it looks like the first is hugely more frequent (and it's the only
one i could imagine saying myself), so it's possible that it's the
source.  then "how about" comes to be treated as a chunk, and the 's
gets located at the end of it.  (the third is just a combo of the
other two variants.)

this story, of course, just reduces one puzzle to another: where the
's of "how's about" comes from.

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

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