Lily is of course right to say that a cahoot is a single-passenger vehicle. :D *loves the idea*
Sem's also right -- according to the OED it was originally singular and switched to plural late in the nineteenth century. If I had to hazard a guess as to why, I'd say because to native English speakers "in cahoot" sounds unnatural. Normally in American English, a singular common noun takes an article after a preposition (we say "in a box" or "in a field," even though we omit the article with a proper noun like "in New York.") So it seems likely that at come point the idiom was unconsciously overcorrected to "in cahoots" so it would sound more like the way we treat other common nouns ("in boxes" as opposed to "in a box").
Just a theory; the OED has nothing to say about why it happened, but unconscious overcorrection like that happens a lot to grammatically anomalous idioms.
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branchandroot
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-10 12:59 pm (UTC)Sem's also right -- according to the OED it was originally singular and switched to plural late in the nineteenth century. If I had to hazard a guess as to why, I'd say because to native English speakers "in cahoot" sounds unnatural. Normally in American English, a singular common noun takes an article after a preposition (we say "in a box" or "in a field," even though we omit the article with a proper noun like "in New York.") So it seems likely that at come point the idiom was unconsciously overcorrected to "in cahoots" so it would sound more like the way we treat other common nouns ("in boxes" as opposed to "in a box").
Just a theory; the OED has nothing to say about why it happened, but unconscious overcorrection like that happens a lot to grammatically anomalous idioms.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-04-10 01:00 pm (UTC)