[Ads-l] t(h)run

[Douglas G. Wilson]

On 5/14/2016 1:44 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
> 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.
--

A few instances of "thurn out" for "turn out" can be Googled.

DARE shows "She trun me down cold" (past tense).

DARE shows "trunning dice" (ostensibly = "throwing dice") (this also 
available at Google Books).

Maybe "t(h)run" was a version (maybe Irish or pseudo-Irish) of 
"turn"/"turned" and and also of "throw"/"threw"/"thrown"?

-- Doug Wilson

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