"through and fro"

[Wilson Gray]

"Written down" is probably better than "show up." "Whole 'nother" is
one of the many BE-isms /  Southernisms that I had to learn not to use
in the classroom, back in the '40's.

-Wilson

On 8/4/06, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      "through and fro"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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
>
>
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