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

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

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

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