Talk:consarn

It seems to me that the second quotation under Etymology 1 ("concern")—"'Leggo my whiskers, consarn ye!' it shouted"—should be under Etymology 2 ("confound") instead. It is exactly the same usage as in the existing Etymology 2 quotation "'Consarn ye, take thet!' And he banged each of the inoffensive animals in the sides with the stock of his gun"; and substituting "concern" ("Leggo my whiskers, concern ye!") makes no sense, while substituting "confound" ("Leggo my whiskers, confound ye!") does.

Also, the etymology under Etymology 2 says, "Alteration on confound." "Alteration on" is not idiomatic English in this context, at least not in most places where English is spoken natively. "Alteration of" is a more universally idiomatic phrase. Googling the two phrases returns over 15,000,000 instances of "alteration of" but only 343,000 of "alteration on", and practically all of those are in contexts much different from this, like "... every modification is an alteration. On the other hand, ..." and "... geochemical indicators for aqueous alteration on Mars have been identified ..." —98.10.53.0 01:40, 20 August 2016 (UTC)


 * ✅ Equinox ◑ 10:09, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

Evidence of "confound" etymology?
The more I think about this, the more Etymology 2 consarns me. It makes very good sense semantically, because used in that way consarn does mean "confound"—but etymologically? That's quite a stretch, one no other dictionary (or other scholarly work that I can find) seems to have made.

What evidence do we have for consarn's evolution from confound? It's easy to see how it evolved from concern—from -cern to -sarn would be just a spelling variant in certain dialects, which I suppose is what "eye dialect spelling" means. But how on earth can we say that -found evolved into -sarn? It seems nearly impossible, unless there is incontestable evidence somewhere that it did indeed happen. I think it's MUCH more likely that the examples given under Etymology 2 actually are just variants of Etymology 1.

One of the common meanings of concern is "bother" ("It concerns me a lot" = "It bothers me a lot"), and "bother it!" is a common if possibly outdated English interjection, with the same basic meaning as "consarn it!". I can see "consarn it!" developing from "concern it!" if at some time in the past (and in some place, since consarn seems to be regional) "concern it!" could have been understood as being equivalent to "bother it!" Literally it's certainly valid, since the "bother" sense of "concern" is entirely standard and common; only its interjectory use is not currently idiomatic.

So (unless someone does have hard evidence for the unlikely evolution of confound into consarn), I think spurious Etymology 2 should be dropped, and a subsection added to the (I think) true Etymology (the "1" can be dropped since there won't be any "2") from concern, explaining that this interjectory use of consarn possibly evolved from a now obsolete interjectory use of concern in its "bother" sense.

The one quotation currently under Etymology 2 that doesn't quite fit what I've just said is the relatively recent one from Cynthia Queen, in which consarn is not used as an interjection (although it certainly does have an aura of having been spoken forcefully if the narrator had been telling the story instead of writing it): "He came to camp follerin' this cat and a holloring, 'Here kitty-kitty-kitty' all over the consarned place." Substituting "bothered" for "consarned" in that example doesn't quite work, but it still seems to me that this use also is derived in some way from concern without any need to pull an etymology from confound out of thin air. What comes to mind is that the narrator in the Queen book is a person who definitely would use "consarn it!" as an interjection, and when she (or he—I haven't read the book) uses it as a participial adjective in this quotation its force as an interjection is very much in her mind.

(By the way, I'm making all my suggestions here instead of editing the article myself because I got into trouble several years ago for applying Wikipedia editing standards to Wiktionary, so I'd rather leave actual editing to the local experts.) —98.10.53.0 18:57, 20 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I'm also not convinced by the association, what occurs to me is that 'consarn' rhymes with 'darn' as well as being substitutable with it. perhaps the etymology should mention that, along with the 'concern' connection (and either alongside or instead of the 'confound' one). --Overlordnat1 (talk) 07:38, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I think it may not be entirely coincidental that "con-" also has the same vowel as "God", making "Consarn it" close in rhythm and assonance to "God damn it" (and all of that phrase's various minced versions).--Urszag (talk) 07:53, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Whoops, I wasn't thinking closely enough about the pronunciation when I wrote that: even though spelled the same, the reduced vowel of "con-" is not the same as the vowel of "God" (in most modern accents, at least). The point about rhythm still applies.--Urszag (talk) 07:56, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * Re: "this interjectory use of consarn possibly evolved from a now obsolete interjectory use of concern in its "bother" sense."
 * We have no evidence of this possibility.
 * We might be better off to make Ety 2 "unknown". If this is a North American usage that surfaces in the 19th century, it came at a time when there were many creations hard to pin down etymologically. DCDuring (talk) 16:02, 14 February 2024 (UTC)