Heard on [adult swim]: "street" to "alley"?

[Randy Alexander]

COCA has 67 hits for:Â up [app*] alley, where [app*] means any
possessive pronoun.  No relevant hits when substituting "street" for
"alley".

BNC has either no hits, or I'm not doing it right.  The POS codes
there seem to be different, and it looks like the code for the
possessive pronoun is [pos*].

I've always heard "up [possessive determiner] alley" and never
"street" or anything else (where [possessive determiner] includes all
of the possessive pronouns and anything with apostrophe s).

Randy

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 9:18 PM, Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: Â  Â  Â  American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster: Â  Â  Â  Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
> Subject: Â  Â  Â Re: Heard on [adult swim]: "street" to "alley"?
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On May 20, 2009, at 6:08 AM, i wrote:
>
> >>
> > "right up your alley" is my only usage. Â goggling gets 431k raw hits
> > for "alley", 64k for "street", none for "road".
>
> sorry. Â make that 181 (not 181k, 181) for "road".
>
> arnold
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



--
Randy Alexander
Jilin City, China
My Manchu studies blog:
http://www.bjshengr.com/manchu

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