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Chris -- 2018-04-11
Checking out a hunch while thinking about “I’ll get out†I found these three examples:
And I am envious as old get-out! COMOX BC…. August 16, 2003, Comox BC… White Rock Air Cadet earns his Wings and a Jet Fighter ride near the Speed of …
Carol Laula – [ Traducir esta página ] I came back as brown as old get out! Mull was wonderful. Our host – Gordon McLean – who was putting the gig on at An Tobar in Tobermory, couldn’t have been …\
Grand Admiral Joe & the Buried Treasure: A Fictitious Adventure / ... – Resultado de la Búsqueda de libros de Google de Allen Hingle – 2004 – Fiction – 372 páginas The mines are presently dangerous as old get out. The timbers have had over a hundred years to rot and weaken. Back in the mines, recently we found an elk … books.google.com.mx/books?isbn=1412009359…
Is “old get-out†somebody like “old scratchâ€? The mines whose timbers have rotted and weakened over the course of a hundred years and more suggests “old you-better-get-outâ€.
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I’m guessing they are slippages or reformations of “all get out” eg He was as excited as all get out
A mis-hearing of all for I’ll?
All get out is heard here in NZ, but not commonly. I’ve probsably heard more from an older generation, like my parents ie people in their sixties. Younger people here tend to describe an extreme idea with ‘totally’ “Like he was totally excited”. (like seems a manadatory sentence opener for my younger workmates)
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Yes, sorry I didn’t make it clear in the heading or in the post, but I certainly was thinking of it as a reshaping of “as all get-outâ€. I think I made that clearer in the earlier post (“Adj as I’ll get-outâ€.)
.
And yes, it is pretty old-fashioned, and was colloquial if not slangy even when it was more common. “Totally†is, as you note, like all more fashionable now, and beginning sentences with “like†or “so†is also very common. (I have heard a number of formal presentations of papers at conferences begin with “So,â€.)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2009-02-26 20:43:05)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Hi David
I suspected as much, but could not simply assume that Just because something is fairly common here in Kiwiland that it is also commoin elsewhere. I know too well that we have kept old sayings discarded by Mother England, and invented quite a few of our own.
As we say down here, “Sweet as!”, which can mean ‘awesone’ or simply ‘that’s all right’.
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DavidTuggy wrote:
(I have heard a number of formal presentations of papers at conferences begin with “So,â€.)
Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf famously/notoriously renders the first word of the poem (“Hwaet!”) as “So”—so I’m convinced that what you’re seeing is evidence of the all-pervasive influence of Anglo-Saxon poetry in modern society. I could be wrong.
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