real English?

[Mike Trittipo]

On Mar 14 2008, Wayles Browne wrote:

>David said 188 hits, but my Google search found only 6, of which 4 

Google using the exact phrase "an arm's throw" with the quotation marks 
estimated the number at 188 originally, but by the third page had revised 
the estimate down to 33 (by omitting others "similar" to the 33). The 33 
included pages outside Proz, of course.

http://www.rootsweb.com/~nehamilt/cemetery/farmer.html (in what is claimed 
to be a 1934 article written in a Lincoln, Nebraska newspaper)

and

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/2278/all_the_worlds_a_stage_inside_.php 
quoting a Canadian in Ontario

and

http://archive.uua.org/news/mblanding.html quoting an East Coast prof.

and

http://www.nps.gov/shen/historyculture/displaced.htm apparently written by 
Audrey J. Horning, of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and The Queen's 
University of Belfast.

I've only ever heard "a stone's throw." And "a stone's throw" is what I'd 
write. I'd probably also edit "an arm's throw" into "a stone's throw" if 
asked to polish something. But the span of years (1934 to now) and 
geography (Nebraska, Ontario, Belfast) in apparently native users seems to 
show -- I won't say an actual idiom, but at least a mistaken form that 
reappears spontaneously.

It also happens to appear as a string in Antony and Cleopatra: A Novel By 
Colleen McCullough, but the context there is clearly literal, not 
idiomatic: "[Agrippa had a secret weapon.] He had taken an ordinary tossing 
grapnel and turned i into something that could be fired from a scorpion at 
a much longer distance than an arm's throw."

Michael Trittipo
Minneapolis, Minnesota

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