Why do we describe someone or something very special as all that and a bag of chips? It’s an intensifier of the expression all that and appears to have been popularized by a 1991 newspaper story about new slang, playing off the earlier...
Mallory in Minneapolis wonders about her father’s all’s, as in all’s you have to do. That final s isn’t a plural tacked onto all, but likely the remnant of an older contraction, from all as, with the sense of all that. The related form alst points...