Syntactic blend: "out of a sudden"

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On May 19, 2008, at 12:35 PM, Gerald Cohen wrote:

> One of my students has written to me about a possible blend, and I
> now share his message with
> ads-l.  He is correct in suspecting the example is a blend, and no,
> I had never come across this one before.  My thanks to him for
> sending it along.
>
> Gerald Cohen
>
> [message from student]:
>
> Hi Dr. Cohen,
>
> I found a phrase used in a message[1] on a mailing list that might
> be of
> interest to you. The writer used the phrase "Out of a sudden" to
> characterize unexpected software behavior, which to me appears to be
> a blend
> of "out of nowhere"

or "out of the blue"

> and "all of a sudden".

plenty of hits.  google on "all out of a sudden" to get a small
collection of pretty clear ones.

arnold

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