all of the sudden, one at the time, still in the bed

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Sep 6, 2006, at 11:22 AM, Larry Horn wrote:

>> On Sep 6, 2006, at 8:26 AM, Larry Horn wrote:
>>
>>> ... I think
>>> represent a rather different phenomenon from "one at the time" or
>>> "all of the sudden", which seem entirely foreign to me, partly
>>> because "one at a time" and "all of a sudden" appear to be idiomatic
>>> and entirely non-compositional in terms of the indefinite.  Those
>>> examples are closer to "He kicked a bucket", involving a
>>> dialectal or
>>> idiolectal reanalysis of the idiom rather than an extension of
>>> definites under certain semantic and pragmatic conditions.
>>
>> my feeling exactly.
>>
>> no quick finds on "kick a bucket" 'die', by the way -- but then there
>> are an awful lot of hits to sort through.
>>
>> arnold
>>
> Sorry for being cryptic.  What I meant was that "one at the time"
> strikes me as being as foreign and sui generis (i.e. outside my
> dialectal competence) as "kick a bucket [idiomatically]"

yes, i understood that, and agree with your judgment.

> would if I
> came across it, which I'm not conscious of ever have doing

nor i.  so i checked, hoping, frankly, *not* to find any real examples.

i fear *i* was the cryptic one here.

> --and no
> doubt very much like the effect of my "stand on line" to many non-New
> Yorkers.

yes, you get that "Martian! Martian!" look.

my pennsylvania-dutchism "a scissors" provokes a similar response.

arnold

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