Dorking.
_The Words "Cash" and "Mob"_ (Vol. viii., p. 386.).--MR. FOX was right:
_mob_ is not genuine English--teste Dean Swift! A lady who was well known
to Swift used to say that the greatest scrape she ever got into with him
was by using the word _mob_. "Why do you say that?" he exclaimed in a
passion; "never let me hear you say that again!" "Why, sir," she asked,
"what am I to say?" "The rabble, to be sure," answered he. (Sir W. Scott's
_Works of Swift_, vol. ix.) The word appears to have been introduced about
the commencement of the eighteenth century, by a process to which we owe
many other and similar barbarisms--"beauties introduced to supply the want
of wit, sense, humour, and learning." In a paper of _The Tatler_, No. 230.,
much in the spirit, and possibly from the pen, of Swift, complaint is made
of the "abbreviations and elisions" which had recently been introduced, and
a humorous example of them is given. By these, the author adds,
"Consonants of most obdurate sound are joined together without one
softening vowel to intervene; and all this only to make one syllable of
two, directly contrary to the example of the Greeks and Romans, and a
natural tendency towards relapsing into barbarity. And this is still
more visible in the next refinement, which consists in pronouncing the
first syllable in a word that has many, and dismissing the rest. Thus
we cram one syllable and cut off the rest, as the owl fattened her mice
after she had bit off their legs to prevent their running away; and if
ours be the same reason for maiming our words, it will certainly answer
the end, for I am sure no other nation will desire to borrow them."
I have only to add (see _Blackwood's Magazine_, vol. ii., 1842) that "mob
is _mobile_."
_Cash_ appears to be from the French _caisse_, a chest, cash.