Eggcorn Forum

This one’s a little dicey, especially since often the noun “churn” is right in there:
http://www.crackerbarrel.com/about-decor.cfm?doc_id=96
“Hand-turned butter churns were made and used from the early 1800s through the 1950s or 1960s.”

This article on methods of churning butter does show a glass churn jar with a crank handle – it notes “Millions of hand-turned glass churn jars were used from the early 1800s through the 1950s or 1960s.”
http://webexhibits.org/butter/kitchen.html
The article refers to a “dash butter churn” which has a vertical plunger, but I think they mean “dasher,” not “dash” (the OED does not list them as synonyms.) People who have not visited a historial reenactment site recently might forget about the vertical movement of the dasher and think it is supposed to be turned instead.

With ice cream, the motion is more circular (hand-cranked seems a better adjective), so it seems that people might really mean to say hand-turned, though a cranking motion is not the same as a turning motion.
“He made his ice cream the old fashioned way with a hand turned ice cream churn and fresh natural ingredients.”
http://www.associatedcontent.com/articl … tural.html

There might also be some confusion with “hand-turned” in the sense of turning wood with a lathe (which seems like a misnomer since you need a machine to spin the item, and the hand is only holding an implement to the spinning wood.) The only example of a reversal I could find also oddly includes the correct word as well as the incorrect one.
“These pillars may have been hand churned while the others were lathe turned.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chennakesava_Temple

There is a lot of intentional baby talk usage of “churn” for “turn” as in “Would anyone like to take a churn?”
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/99/99sbostonteens.phtml