"through and fro"

[Jonathan Lighter]

African-American colloquialisms of all kinds were obviously very poorly recorded  before the 1960s.

  That becomes more evident the more we look back.  There were very few published black novelists and memoirists and even fewer black linguists.

  JL
Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Wilson Gray
Subject: Re: "through and fro"
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"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 wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: Jonathan Lighter
> 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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