Fwd: "nary a "

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 5/29/07, Chris F Waigl <chris at lascribe.net> wrote:
>
> Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
> > as i say, not in the OED (and hard to search for via google).  i'm
> > away from my DARE -- does it have an entry for "ary"?  anyone have
> > any information on this item?
>
> With Google's help, I can find it in quite a few American writers'
> (eye-)dialect passages:

LION (Literature Online) turns up cites for "ary" from the likes of
Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Artemus Ward,
and Robert Lowell. As with the exx. given by Chris, in all of the LION
cites I've seen "ary" is used positively ('any') rather than
negatively ('not any, nary').


--Ben Zimmer

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