_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.
_Cash_ is from the French _caisse_, the moneychest where _specie_ was kept. So _caissier_ became "cashier," and _specie_ "cash."
_Mob_, Swift tells us (_Polite Conversation_, Introd.), is a contraction for _mobile_.
CLERICUS RUSTICUS has not, I fear, Johnson's _Dictionary_, where both these derivations are given.
_Ampers &._ (Vol. ii., pp. 230. 284.; Vol. viii. _passim_).--MR. INGLEBY may well ask what "and-per-se-and" can mean. The fact is, this is itself a corruption. In old spelling-books, after the twenty-six letters it was customary to print the two following symbols with their explanations