@SinTax'ed Enough - I take your point about it being a simile, but I wonder if you'd have found it quite as straightforward if you hadn't read Graeme's comment first; it certainly didn't hit me that way when I first heard it. My first thought was that a butcher's dog is as likely to be overfed as particularly fit.

It is also peculiar to one part of England, and unknown (and not necessarily obvious, it seems) to many Brits, so I think there's a case to be made for also calling it idiomatic. Here's one comment on an idioms wiki - 'Of course the idioms wiki also has a flaw, namely the phrase "fit as a butcher's dog". I have no idea what it means. I might have to scour every idioms dictionary on the internet for it because it makes no sense to me at all'

And 'fit' in its sexual connotation, which is how I first heard this expression, is certainly idiomatic - In British English, 'She's well fit' has nothing to do with going to the gym.

At least I'm not alone in calling it an idiom; the excellent website for English learners, UsingEnglish.com, lists it as such.

Here are a few more as ... as ... constructions that seem to me to qualify as idioms:

as clean as a whistle
as cool as a cucumber
as easy as pie
as pleased as punch
as right as rain
as sick as a dog
as mad as a hatter

@Mahesh - sure we are in the 21st century, and communication is what language is all about. But language also has a history; we're allowed to be interested in that, aren't we? :)

Incidentally, The Times of India seems surprisingly even-handed in this. A site search brings up:
realise - 41,200, realize - 33,400
recognise - 17,000 recognize - 20,000
optimisation - 2,150, optimization - 5,000
nationalisation - 1,260 nationalization - 1,130

@Nemo - I generally agree with you (I think), but not with "everything except the least one" or your statement that - "One of the (comparative)" is always wrong. It's always "one of the (superlative)."

Not quite. Hairy Scot has already given the example "That is one of your more annoying habits" - Logically, we can divide the person's habits into two groups, one group consisting of his more annoying habits (with a subset of his most annoying habits), and another of his less annoying habits, and 'that' is one of the former.

[Set 1 - his bad habits] [Set 2 - his better habits [Subset - the best ones] ]

There are plenty of examples of this use with "the" on the web - "One of the better Travelodges", i.e. not one of the best, but not one of the bad ones either. "One of the stranger B&Bs I've stayed in" - not exactly one of the strangest, but certainly in the category of stranger ones. Also -"Excellent - but splurge on one of the better rooms if you can". These are all grammatically fine, and have a slightly different meaning to the superlative versions.

And sometimes there can be a difference in nuance:

"One of the best moments in the film was when ..." - it sounds quite a good film.
"One of the better moments of the film was when ..." - it could be a straight comment, but it could also sound as though there weren't too many good moments.

In British English, at least, the 'got' versions are more common in normal speech, where we usually contract, while the 'have' versions are more common in written language where we don't usually contract. So I agree that you won't hear contracted versions of 'I have a new car' or 'I have to go to work earlier tomorrow' very often (in a way the 'got' version acts rather like a contracted version).

In Michael Swan's Practical English Usage, he says, for example, that 'I've got a new girlfriend 'is more natural (in BrE) 'I have a new girlfriend'. And all his 'have' examples are uncontracted (as are the ones in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary). But he makes no mention of whether or not 'have' versions cannot be contracted. Although it's unusual I don't think we can say 'I've an appointment tomorrow morning' or 'I've to phone him back later' are actually ungrammatical.

As for sounding natural, I think it depends on the rest of the sentence. For example 'I've to go' doesn't sound very natural to me, but 'I've to be there at eight' sounds fine to me.

Sometimes a contracted 'have' version even sounds better to me than the uncontracted version, for example 'I've no idea' sounds better to me than 'I have no idea' and is used as an example sentence in the OALD, which was discussed here:

http://painintheenglish.com/case/4840

It seems to work with other words after 'no', too - 'Ive no money at the moment', 'We've no intention of leaving'.

Hi Chris B - Probably only on TV comedy programmes, to be honest. But you're right, I no doubt see it a lot more than I hear it. As for LOL, perhaps if the British PM, David Cameron, had checked this in a dictionary or wherever, he might not have made the gaffe of using it to sign off an email (as Lots of Love).

And as I personally never use these things, it's useful for me to be able to look them up as well. Although there are plenty of alternatives to the OED, which I don't have access to, anyway. For example, I only recently found out what the use of asterisks (as you've done with *say*) means. I had to look that one up. VBut I don't suppose it's in any dictionaries yet.

Point taken about the time lag, but with the OED (and no doubt most dictionaries) probably going online only, I'm not sure this will be so important, and it depends on how widely used it is. I seem to remember that 'podcast' was one dictionary's 'Word of the year' almost within a year of appearing.

I also think you're right about the part of the world thing - I think LEGOs is a mainly American usage.

@Really?? - while agreeing with your grammatical conclusions, I wonder whether it is really necessary to be quite so condescending.

@Capitan Typo - What is the job of a dictionary if not to tell people the meanings of words and expressions they hear or see and might not know? Like it or not, a sizeable number of speakers of Standard English say OMG, and it appears a lot on the web; it's even in a billboard advertisement here in Poland. Although many people treat the OED as the 'bible', it never itself set out to be the arbiter of usage; that's what usage guides do (if you really want that sort of thing).

@Captain Typo - I generally like your favourite saying, but would suggest:

1) What the brand-owner wants is neither here nor there in a language sense, only in a legal sense. You can Google with whatever search engine you like, and (in Britain at least) do the hoovering with whatever vacuum cleaner you like.

2) Although I wouldn't personally pluralise LEGO, I think that has more to do with whether or not LEGO is a countable noun. I can't see how you can make a blanket rule that it is grammatically incorrect to pluralise brand names, which are simply proper nouns, and which can be pluralised like any other countable noun:

Who's coming to the party? - Well, there are the two Johns, then there's Jenny ....
He's got two Fords and three Harley-Davidsons
He has an excellent collection of maps of the Americas

3) And even if you couldn't do this in formal documents, for some inexplicable reason, it really is an old chestnut that only what is permissible in formal grammar is "correct". If that were the case, most of us would be talking ungrammatically much of the time, which makes a nonsense of the whole idea of grammar, which is simply the system we use to form words and put them together so we can be mutually understood.

4) 'It may have *fallen* into common usage' - Common usage is exactly how the rules of languages are formed and evolve.

@AnWulf - good to see you doing your bit for international understanding by using what I understood to be a Britishism - 'spot on'. (Although I think the hyphenated spot-on before a noun is American). :)

http://britishisms.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/spot-on/
http://oald8.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/dictionary/spot%20on

Good point about the derivation of pled. And there's a distinct pattern - lead > led, feed > fed, read > read, as others pointed near the beginning of this post.

@Blokin' Smunts - Sorry if you think that definition is a bit vague (although I don't, personally), but in that case, your problem is with Oxford Dictionaries, not with me. Perhaps you find it vague because it's quite a difficult concept to put in words, even though I imagine most of us instinctively know what the Four Tops meant when they sang 'Reach out and I'll be there, or what is meant when a radio station says it wants to reach out to younger listeners. Perhaps the best way to see it is just to think of it as a metaphorical version of the physical act of reaching out. Here are some more definitions and examples from online dictionaries:

Government reaches out to the people (Free Dictionary)
I try to reach out to my daughter but she doesn't want to have anything to do with me (Free Dictionary)

Macmillan gives two definitions:
- to offer help to someone: "We are reaching out to the most vulnerable members of the community."
- to ask someone for help: "She urged him to reach out to his family."

Cambridge also gives two definitions:
- to try to communicate with a person or a group of people, usually in order to help or involve them: "The new mayor is reaching out to the local community to involve them in his plans for the city."
- to offer help and support to someone: "She set up her charity to reach out to the thousands of homeless on the streets."

I don't see that these are about indirect and empty gestures, and in none of these example does 'reach out' simply mean contact (which is what my question was about). In the three examples of the new usage I quoted in my question, the use of 'reach out to' is completely different from all the dictionary examples I've quoted here, meaning simply to contact, get in touch with, phone etc, which we already have perfectly good words and expressions for.

You say - 'Reaching out to libraries on behalf of Google, for example, is an attempt to help make the information contained within more freely available' - sorry, but I think you misunderstood this one, which was no doubt my fault as I didn't quote the whole thing, which read "please reach out to a Library staff member"; it was simply a particular library saying that if users of Google Reader have any problems (with transferring their feeds, as Google Reader is closing down), they should contact a member of staff. Nothing about on behalf of Google or spreading information.

I don't really have that much of a 'hang-up' about it. In my hippy days, I both subconsciously and deliberately used words used by my peer group which no doubt sounded weird to 'straights', and later spent years trying to get rid of them. It's just that this usage sounds a bit affected to me, and I'm by no means alone:

- “Reach out” is one of the best examples of how corporate jargon makes things unnecessarily complicated. The English language already has lots of useful words related to communication. “Reach out to me by phone?” Seriously? How about just “call me?” - Huffington Post

- Jargon for “let’s set up a meeting” or “let’s contact this person.” Just say that—and unless you want the Human Relations department breathing down your neck, please don’t reach out unless clearly invited. - Forbes Magazine

And it's also on nearly every list of the 'Ten most annoying office expressions' type:

- Thinking 'outside the box' and 'going forward' and 'let's touch base' have been found to be the most overused phrases of office jargon. The other annoying office phrases are 'reach out', 'It's on my radar', 'I'm aware', 'flag up', 'low-hanging fruit" - Times of India, commenting on a survey by the London-based Institute of Leadership and Management.

And included in two of the best online collections of office jargon / business buzzwords:

MBA Watch http://www.johnsmurf.com/jargon2.htm
The Office Life http://www.theofficelife.com/business-jargon-dictionary-R.html