Fwd: Safire/NY Times

Mon Apr 2 17:59:11 UTC 2007

note: someone who goes to the OED for "ahold" gets taken onto a
sidetrack.  i happen to have spent some time corresponding with
someone who did just that and decided that the MWDEU entry was
wrong.  the irony is that the MWDEU entry relied heavily on the OED
-- but on its  entries for "hold" and "get", not "ahold".

on the other hand, i have to stress again that anyone with any
interest in english usage, and especially anyone with a professional
interest in it, should have a copy of MWDEU on their desk and should
consult it regularly.  it doesn't say everything there is to be said,
but it's still a goldmine.

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu>
> Date: April 2, 2007 10:42:51 AM PDT
> To: juliet mohnkern <juliet.mohnkern at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Safire/NY Times
>
>
> On Apr 2, 2007, at 7:40 AM, you wrote:
>
>> Grab Ahold Questions
>
>> 1. Should "grab ahold" be hypenated?  Should there be a space
>> between a and hold? What is the correct usage?
>
> There are two constructions here, with alternative spellings for
> the second:
>
> (1) get/catch/grab/take/etc. hold of: no "a"
>
> (2) get/catch/grab/take/etc. a hold/ahold of: with "a"
>
> The choice between the two versions of (2) is entirely a matter of
> spelling.  It's grossly comparable to the choice between "a lot"
> and "alot", "for a while" and "for awhile", and "all right" and
> "alright" (though the details are different in each case).  In all
> of these cases, the two-word spellings are the originals, and the
> solid spellings are innovations that capture the phonological and
> semantic unity of the combinations.
>
> (The case of "ahold" is complicated by the fact that there is
> another "ahold", usually spelled "a-hold", an adverbial which is
> historically a preposition "a" -- a reduced form of the OE
> preposition "an, on" -- plus the noun "hold", similar to "abed",
> "asleep", and a number of others.  The OED has cites, mostly very
> colloquial in tone, for adverbial "a(-)hold" from 1872, though the
> analysis of a few of the cites is unclear; it can be hard to
> distinguish adverbial from nominal "ahold".)
>
> If we ask what the vox populi says about the three variants, it's
> pretty much a dead heat: in raw Google webhits on 4/2/07:
>
> "get hold of" 1,210,000
> "get a hold of" 1,170,000
> "get ahold of" 1,080,000
>
> My collections of modern examples don't have any at all for
> hyphenated "a-hold", and I don't see any in the first hundred hits
> for "get a hold of" (a search that would pick up hyphenated
> examples).  So I see hyphenation as a total non-starter.
>
> The advice literature generally sees the issue as a choice between
> "hold" and "ahold" (for some reason, most of the handbooks ignore
> the "a hold" variant; I suppose they just assume that "ahold" is
> the 'correct' colloquial spelling.)  Representative treatments:
> -----
> Wilson 1993 (Columbia Guide to Standard English), for ahold:
>
> is limited to Conversational levels and the Informal writing that
> imitates them. The Standard idiom for all levels is [get, take,
> lay, grab, etc.] hold of, as in Try to get hold of his teacher.
> -----
> Brians, Common Errors in English Usage, on-line version for ahold/
> hold:
>
> In standard English you just "get hold of" something or somebody.
> -----
> Garner's Modern American Usage (2003):
>
> ahold.  This noun is an American CASUALISM equivalent to hold.  It
> ordinarily follows the verb get.  Though omitted from most British
> dictionaries, it appears in most American dictionaries and surfaces
> fairly often in informal contexts...
> -----
>
> (AHD4 has an entry for "ahold"; NOAD2 does not.)
>
> MWDEU has piles of examples of "ahold" from quoted speech.  In
> fact, it maintains that, "When transcribed from speech, [the idiom]
> is generally styled as one word, ahold."  That would be what we
> have in the quotation from George W. Bush, which was transcribed
> from speech.
>
>> 2. What is its origin?  Is it a new construction?
>
> Neither (1) nor (2) is at all new.  The relevant OED entry, for
> "get" (v.) says:
> -----
> 12. b. Frequently with noun of action as obj.: To succeed in doing,
> obtain opportunity to do, what the n. implies. Also in phrases to
> get (a) sight (a glance, glimpse, peep, etc.) of, to get (a) hold
> of (x on, x upon), to get possession of, etc.
>  -----
> [the OED's early get + hold cites, from 1535, 1568, and 1613, lack
> the "a"; the only cite with "a" is from 1703]
>
> MWDEU maintains that the idiom lacks "a" "in the idiom of the
> majority of English speakers and writers from Shakespeare to the
> present" (p. 59).  "Since the late 19th century, the minority idiom
> with "a" seems to have been gaining in respectability, but it is
> still primarily a spoken rather than a written form."
>
> So construction (1) has been dominant, at least in careful written
> English, but (2) has been gaining over the past 100+ years.  I'm
> perfectly happy myself with (2), but I write "a hold" (two words)
> rather than "ahold" (solid).  There's a sense in which "ahold" has
> two strikes against it in formal writing: it's an instance of
> construction (2), which is colloquial; and it has a non-standard
> solid spelling.  But it should be fine for representing casual speech.
>
>> 3. Are there any similar constructions? Is the formation of ahold
>> part of a larger linguistic phenomenon?
>
> See my comments above on "alot" etc.
>
>> 4. Have you noticed this phrase being used more often recently?
>
> This is a poor question.  As I've stressed again and again on ADS-L
> and the Language Log, people's -- even professional linguists' --
> impressions about how often some item is used and how recently it
> appeared are unreliable, to the point of being absolutely unusable
> as evidence about the state of the language.
>
>> 5. When do you remember first seeing it used?
>
> As I said in a 6/10/07 posting to the ADS-L, I was first struck by
> "ahold" in Elizabeth Kolbert's Letter from Alaska: "Last words: A
> language dies" (about Eyak), 6 June 2005, p. 59:
>  -----
> The project was largely the work of a former TV reporter from
> Anchorage named Laura Bliss Spaan.  She first heard about the Eyak
> in 1992, when she was sent to Cordova to cover the Ice Worm
> Festival. "When Eyak gets ahold of you, it's really hard to
> escape," she explained to me.
> -----
> Note that it's in a quotation.
>
> Now, I probably saw "ahold" in print thousands of times before,
> over many decades, but this was the first time it caught my
> attention.  That's a fact about me and my mental life, not a fact
> about construction (2) or the spelling "ahold".
>
>> 6.  Has its meaning or usage changed over time?
>
> I have no data at all on the spread of the spelling "ahold" in
> construction (2), but it would be an interesting project.  You'd
> have to go beyond the small sampling of data in the OED and the
> hard-to-interpret data from easy web searches, though.
>
> Arnold
>

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