[Ads-l] t(h)run

[Jonathan Lighter]

1901 Charles Macomb Flandreau, "The Diary of a Harvard Freshman," in
_Saturday Evening Post_ (Jan. 19) 11: All the men jumped up on their
chairs ...and yelled, "Down in front - down in front!" and "Trun him
out!"

1902 _The National Engineer _ (Dec.) 25: "Smash th' thraitor," "Slub
[sic] de beef-eatin' bully," "Trun 'im out." Quicker'n scat, Mike was
at the bottom of a fightin', strugglin' mas off mad Irishmen.

1916 Walter Alden Dyer _Gulliver the Great_ (N.Y.: Century) 57: Well,
you take Maginnis an' trun 'im out. We can't have no lousy mutts
around here now. Where did ye find the dirty baste?"

I wonder if this present-tense "trun" is really a metathesis of "turn."

JL

On Sat, May 14, 2016 at 12:01 PM, Douglas G. Wilson <douglas at nb.net> wrote:
> On 5/14/2016 9:11 AM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>>
>> For _threw_.
>>
>> This makes a brief appearance in DARE, s.v. _throw_, but I can't find any
>> exx. in the online ed.  Not in OED.
>>
>> The 1930 semi-classic film _The Bat Whispers_ features a bumbling
>> small-town detective (Charles Dow Clark). Clark, acc. to IMDb, was born in
>> Vermont in 1869.  When somebody drops a vase on his head, he asks,
>> clearly,
>> "Who thrun that?"
>>
>> I don't think I've encountered _thrun_ before.
>>
>> Perhaps the _locus classicus_ of "trun" is in a song called "The Portland
>> County Jail" that Carl Sandburg included in his _American Songbag_ (1927):
>>
>> "Saturday night when I got tight, he trun me in the can."
>
> --
>
> I see that DARE shows "t(h)run" not only for "threw" and "thrown" but even
> for "throw" (with examples).
>
> DARE derives this from Irish dialectal "thrun"/"threwn" (used for past and
> participle and "occasionally" in present tense) (if I'm reading it right).
>
> MW3 shows "trun" = "threw".
>
> I don't recall encountering anything like "t(h)run" myself.
>
> -- Doug Wilson
>
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