Re: "taw" (was Re: History of "Walk Around")

I did a little looking using Google's advanced book search facility and found a reference to "taw" meaning a square dance partner from 1896. The book is _An Illustrated History of Monroe County, Iowa: ..._ [lengthy subtitles omitted], by Frank Hickenlooper. Here's the relevant passage, from page 214: At the common "hoedown" those French terms used by the man who "calls off" are Anglicised into plain English; for instance, the caller will shout the familiar term "Chassez partners!" but in the "hoedown" whirl it is translated into: "Swing your taw, Everybody dance to please Grandpa!" I don't see anything in the surrounding text that sheds more light on the etymology of this usage of "taw". While the passage includes the word "Chassez", it doesn't include the word "autour". (It also seems to imply that the French "Chassez" is equivalent to the English "swing"--whatever "swing" meant in that part of Iowa at the time under discussion--but I wouldn't put any stock at all in that without other, and stronger, evidence.) Note: Since Google Books makes scanned images of this entire book available, I was able to check that the word "taw" found by my search is indeed what appeared in the text (and not the result of an OCR error) and that 1896 is indeed the publication date of the book (and not an OCR error for "1996" or a street address misinterpreted as a date). I mention this because sometimes when a book search returns what seems to be an unusually early hit, it's actually the result of some such error, and they don't always make enough of the book available to let you check. --Jim