IV. LAW OF HOBSON-JOBSON.

In many places in the Dictionary, I find I have used the expression "the law of Hobson-Jobson." The name is an adaptation from the expression used by Col. Yule and Mr. Burnell as a name for their interesting Dictionary of Anglo-Indian words. The law is well recognised, though it has lacked the name, such as I now venture to give it. When a word comes from a foreign language, those who use it, not understanding it properly, give a twist to the word or to some part of it from the hospitable desire to make the word at home in its new quarters, no regard, however, being paid to the sense. The most familiar instance in English is crayfish from the French ecrevisse, though it is well known that a crayfish is not a fish at all. Amongst the Mohammedans in India there is a festival at which the names of "Hassan" and "Hosein" are frequently called out by devotees. Tommy Atkins, to whom the names were naught, converted them into "Hobson, Jobson." That the practice of so altering words is not limited to the English is shown by two perhaps not very familiar instances in French, where "Aunt Sally" has become ane sale, "a dirty donkey," and "bowsprit" has become beau pre, though quite unconnected with "a beautiful meadow." The name "Pigeon English" is itself a good example. It has no connection with pigeon, the bird, but is an Oriental's attempt to pronounce the word "business." It hardly, however, seems necessary to alter the spelling to "pidjin."

It may be thought by some precisians that all Australasian English is a corruption of the language. So too is Anglo-Indian, and, pace Mr. Brander Matthews, there are such things as Americanisms, which were not part of the Elizabethan heritage, though it is perfectly true that many of the American phrases most railed at are pure old English, preserved in the States, though obsolete in Modern England; for the Americans, as Lowell says, "could not take with them any better language than that of Shakspeare." When we hear railing at slang phrases, at Americanisms, some of which are admirably expressive, at various flowers of colonial speech, and at words woven into the texture of our speech by those who live far away from London and from Oxford, and who on the outskirts of the British Empire are brought into contact with new natural objects that need new names, we may think for our comfort on the undoubted fact that the noble and dignified language of the poets, authors and preachers, grouped around Lewis XIV., sprang from debased Latin. For it was not the classical Latin that is the origin of French, but the language of the soldiers and the camp-followers who talked slang and picked words up from every quarter. English has certainly a richer vocabulary, a finer variety of words to express delicate distinctions of meaning, than any language that is or that ever was spoken: and this is because it has always been hospitable in the reception of new words. It is too late a day to close the doors against new words. This Austral English Dictionary merely catalogues and records those which at certain doors have already come in.