"through and fro"

[Jonathan Lighter]

With a couple of hundred raw Googlits, you might think this a new malapropism/ solecism/ eggcorn. But it isn't:

  1861  Pvt. Dan O'Connor, USMC, in D. M. Sullivan _USMC in Civil War_ I 188: The ships went...round & round trough and fro  the enemy opened fire from a nother battery.

  O'Connor spells "through" as {trough} elsewhere: "When the navy will get trough with the south Jef Davis will have nothing to brag of".  He also spells "my" as {me}. The implied pronunciations suggest an Irish connection beyond O'Connor's name, but he was not necessarily of Irish birth: Charles Townsend uses comparable spellings for his fictional Bowery character "Chimmie Fadden" a generation later.

  Also note the erroneous analysis of "another."  OED's 2003 revisions offer only one 19th C. ex., from the South (1850).  ("Whole nother" doesn't seem to show up until 1963.)

  JL


---------------------------------
Groups are talking. We´re listening. Check out the handy changes to Yahoo! Groups.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org