Hello and happy holidays.
While reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I came across the expression "consound it" in Huck's dialogue parts.
"Consound it, Tom Sawyer, you're just old pie, 'longside o' what I am."
"Then consound it, we've fooled away all this work for nothing."
Does anyone know what it means? I am guessing by context that it works as an interjection and it means "quit it", "give it up" or something. Thanks in advance!
Best Answer
"Consound it" means the same thing as "confound it".
My guess is that the interjection "confound it" was thought to be too strong in Hannibal, Missouri, at the time of Mark Twain's childhood. So people changed the pronunciation slightly to avoid using "bad words". (I don't see anything objectionable in "confound it", but maybe it was perceived as a euphemism for "damn it" that was somehow too close to the original.)
When Mark Twain was editing his original draft of Huckleberry Finn, he changed at least one instance of "consound it" to "confound it". See this link. Tom Sawyer contains both "confound it" and "consound it".