augurs » all goes

Chiefly in:   all goes well (for)

Classification: English – vocalized /l/

Spotted in the wild:

  • “IF RRL come out with an announcement re GOLD production to start getting a $$$flow it all goes well for Future exploration” (link)
  • “he almost got something from the game but despite losing late on Lisselton did show a marked improvement in form and it all goes well for the future.” (link)

Analyzed or reported by:

  • Paul Brians (Common Errors in English Usage)

See “augur” » “auger” for comments about the rarity of “augur”, which encourages its reshaping. Here things like “it augurs well (for)” are assimilated to the very common (and semantically similar) “it all goes well (for)”, as in “I hope it all goes well for you” ‘I hope things all go well for you’. The vocalization of l (as in “all”) and r (as in “augurs”) in some varieties of English might make some phonetic contribution to the reshaping.

| link | entered by Arnold Zwicky, 2005/04/10 |

Commentaries

  1. 1

    Commentary by Dick Moser , 2005/05/18 at 2:17 pm

    Seems to me that “all goes well” is more likely to be derived from “bodes well” rather than from any construction of “augurs”, just because of the similarity of sounds.

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