strum up support

Arnold M. Zwicky zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU
Wed Jun 13 15:47:34 UTC 2007


i caught this one in the 5/27/07 NYT Magazine, p. 32, in Jon
Mooallem's "The Unintended Consequences of Rehydration":

The morning I visited, he had unearthed 300 copies of letters
Chambers sent, often while overseas for business, to strum up support
for the bottle bill.
www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/magazine/27Bottle-t.html?
pagewanted=3&incamp=article_popular

the idiom i know is "drum up", not "strum up", and OED, NOAD2, and
AHD4 agree with me (entries for "drum up", no corresponding sense for
"strum").

48 google webhits ("similar" entries removed) for "strum up
support".  many have some association with music-making (the Mummers,
for example), but some do not, e.g.:

LaMont says it wasn’t easy to strum up support, as people often do
not consider film an art form and, therefore, do not think of
donating to this industry. ...
www.contact-mag.com/issue3/theater.htm

There’s no better way to strum up support in New England than take a
shot at the Yankees—a marketing method that has proven golden for
short-season Lowell ...
www.baseballamerica.com/blog/business/

... they actually apply to women, rather, they use it as a political
chess piece to strum up support for their causes and abandon us when
the need arises. ...
bitingbeaver.blogspot.com/2005/11/scalito-and-future-of-roe.html

They strum up support for their projects by concocting some
unrelated, bizarre relationship between a group's opposition and some
other irrelevant issue. ...
thepeach.blogspot.com/2005_02_27_archive.html

It is only Beth Twitty saying that to strum up support. I have not
seen any official document saying this. More of the same. Beth wants
the world to believe ...
www.scaredmonkeys.com/2005/09/ 25/joran-van-der-sloot-denies-
responsibility/

-----

something eggcornesque.

arnold

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