"all's" and "how's"/"what's"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

DARE does indeed have a (short) entry for "all's", which it
identifies as a contraction of "all" and the pronoun "as" (meaning
here the relativizer "as") and gives the meaning 'all that'.  only
one example, from 1967 fieldwork in amherst, mass., where several
people in their middle or late 20s were said to use it frequently.
there's also once cite for the variant "al(l)st".

elsewhere in DARE, relativizer "as" is marked as "formerly
widespread, now chiefly Midl, Sth.

in any case, "all's" gets over ten thousand relevant webhits, so it's
certainly in wide use.

along the way, i case across a herb stahlke Linguist List posting of
2/10/92, noting that "how's come" for "how come" was widespread in
his part of the midwest (he teaches at Ball State).  about as many
webhits as "all's".

so it looks like there are two histories here: "all's" and "so's",
with contracted relativizer "as"; and some kind of extension of "how"
in the idioms "how about" and "how come", giving "how's about" and
"how's come".  oh dear, and "what's about" too:

Hello, I heard that we could use right mouse button as we used left
button, but it seems that it's not true... so, what's about it? ...
chattyfig.figleaf.com/pipermail/flashcoders/2003-August/086199.html

(quite a pile of these.)

[oh yes, then there's the -s of dialectal "anyways", which the OED
identifies as the marker of an adverbial genitive, as in "always".]

arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

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