[Ads-l] For want of an apostrophe ... [correction to the OED]

[Robin Hamilton]

> 
>     There's a style of historical cap called a “mob cap”. “Mob” here makes
>     sense to me not as a garment but as a cap: The list would then be all
>     headgear.
> 

That's how the OED reads it, Amy, and why they place the Head quotation where
they do, "Mob" as a short version of "mob cap".

"Mob" as a Cant term for a female begins to be recorded in the early 1660s, and
shows-up in two pretty important Cant texts -- "On the Budge" and "Twenty Black
Tradesmen" -- which Richard Head printed in a later text of his, _The Canting
Academy_ (1673). 

Aside from the disputed quotation, "Mob" as a female shows up once elsewhere in
_The English Rogue_ (1665) and three times in all  -- Head's definition in his
Glossary, and in the two poems -- in _The Canting Academy_.  “Mob cap”, in
contrast, is a Standard English term and as far as I know doesn't occur anywhere
in Richard Head's work, either in the short or the long form.

All in all (and leaving aside the spurious punctuation added by the OED to their
citation), I think the more plausible sense of the term as it appears in what
ends up as the OED citation is "Mob (Cant) = woman" rather "Mob (short for SE
mob cap) = garment".

     Robin

(There are three problems related to Mob [Cant] = "woman" -- pejoration,
transference, and linkage.

1.  Pejoration.  "Mob" possibly starts off as a neutral Cant term for a generic
female but ends up as a synonym for a prostitute.  As a Cant term, it's [later?]
bracketed by "Buttock" (downmarket prostitute) and "Miss" (the kept woman of a
single man -- courtesan?).

2. Transference.  When Cant terms enter more general usage as Slang, they tend
to have the corners knocked off -- the clearest example of this is "blowen" --
and are both simplified from the original meaning and usually move downmarket.

3. Linkage.  This would turn on a possible relation between "Mob" = female
companion and "Mob" (gang) = criminal companion.  A phonaesthetic link, perhaps.
 OK, that's a stretch, but we do have the two terms as homophones, together with
both having the sense of "companion" as part of their semantic mix.

R.)

> 
>     On 28 March 2017 at 13:04 Amy West <medievalist at W-STS.COM> wrote:
> 
>     On 3/28/17 12:00 AM, ADS-L automatic digest system wrote:
>     > Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2017 10:51:52 +0100
>     > From: Robin Hamilton<robin.hamilton3 at VIRGINMEDIA.COM>
>     > Subject: For want of an apostrophe ... [correction to the OED]
>     >
>     > Not quite a hanging matter, but the absence of an apostrophe causes the
>     > OED to
>     > provide a false citation for MOB, n1, "†2. A loose informal garment for
>     > a woman;
>     > = dishabille n. 2. Also mob-dress. Obs."
>     >
>     > The problem with this entry is the first citation. This reads, as the
>     > OED gives
>     > it:
>     >
>     > "1665 R. Head Eng. Rogue I. sig. F5v, Their Mobs, Scarfs, and Hoods all
>     > rent."
> 
>     There's a style of historical cap called a "mob cap". "Mob" here makes
>     sense to me not as a garment but as a cap: The list would then be all
>     headgear.
> 
>     ---Amy West
> 
> 
>     ------------------------------------------------------------
>     The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org