Safire/NY Times (request re "grab ahold) (fwd)

[Wilson Gray]

I have "get aloose from" but "get free of"; "the dog got aloose"; "the
dog is aloose"; "we let the dog aloose." I've long known that there is
a variant, "loose." However, I was in my mid-forties before an
originally-casual conversation - I got pissed when my interlocutor
tried to tell me that "loose' was the only standard form and that I
was the only person that he had ever known who used "aloose" - led to
the astounding (to me) discovery that "aloose" is not standard.

I agree with arnold's analysis and commentary.

-Wilson

On 4/4/07, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Safire/NY Times (request re "grab ahold) (fwd)
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Apr 3, 2007, at 1:49 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
>
> > On 4/3/07, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> What about "aloose," as in "get aloose," which is just as grammatical
> >> as "get ahold / get aholt" for me? OED Online has "aloose" only as an
> >> obsolete verb.
> >
> > DARE's got it, marked Southern/Midland, with cites back to 1884. (And
> > it has "ahold/aholt" back to 1872.)
>
> what's the syntax and semantics here?  is it "get (a)loose of/from"
> 'get free of/from' [some constraint]?  can "aloose" be used for
> "loose" in things like "the dog got loose"?  "the dog is loose"?  "we
> let the dog loose"?
>
> in any case, i take "(a)loose" to be adj/adv here, not a nominal.
> ("(a)hold", however, does seem to be nominal; note "get (a) firm hold
> of" and the like, with a modifying adjective -- in this case the
> version with "a" is preferred to the one without, though both occur.)
>
> so the "a" of "aloose" is almost surely the old preposition, not the
> indefinite article.  it looks like "(a)loose" is parallel to the "(a)
> foul" of "fall/run (a)foul of".  the OED analyzes "afoul", "awry",
> "aright", and "awrong" (no doubt there are others) as originally
> preposition + noun, but you can see how people would think of them as
> "a" + adj/adv (the whole thing functioning as an adverbial), which
> would allow them to create new instances.  (the other words that now
> look like preposition + adj/adv are *much* older than "aloose", and
> have older spellings as two words: "fall a foul" etc.)
>
> the old preposition "a" is, of course, the initial element of the
> famous "a-VERBin'" (as in "We were just a-talkin' about that") --
> originally preposition + verbal noun.
>
> none of this is really relevant to "get/grab/etc. (a) hold of" (or
> its spelling with "ahold"), but it's nevertheless interesting.
>
> arnold
>
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