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

[Erik Hoover]

Also not helpful to the 'grab ahold' inquiry, but persons intrigued
by Arnold's comments may also note with interest that nautical
terminology has many examples of these old words formed from old
preposition a:

Abaft, abeam, aboard, adrift, afloat, aloft, amidships, astern, and
so on.


Erik

On Apr 4, 2007, at 11:13 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky 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)
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> 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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