all fours » our fours
Spotted in the wild:
- We fell a hundred times before we learned how to walk. If we had become impatient and given up, we would be crawling on our fours even today! (link)
- In the entire three days we needed to get to the summit, we crawled on our fours, over snow and ice slopes between 65 and 70 degrees steep. (link)
- we walked and we moved on our…on our fours (knees and hands) until we found a…a space in the center of the deck (link)
Two remarks. (1) I have categorized this, quite hesitantly, as “vocalized /l/”; I invite correction or amplification on this point. (2) Somewhat unusually for this database (as far as I know–again, I invite correction), the third of these cited occurrences–”we walked and we moved on our…on our fours (knees and hands)”–is from transcribed speech, namely, an oral history “made by Robert Shuster and Steve Gertz and … completed in November 1993″ (Shuster was and is the archivist of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, Illinois, USA); the notes before the transcription make it clear that the “…” represents the speaker pausing, and that the gloss “(knees and hands)” was the speaker’s, not the transcribers’.
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