Advertise here for as little as 40 baht per week
Bobby’s British Breakfast Foods
UK Sausages, Ham, Bacon, Pies, Teas etc.
Call 087 155 7737 or 089 985 7473
SERVED UP BY...
A section for all you budding etymologists where each week the origin of a word or phrase is investigated.
This week it is..... Hobson’s choice
No real choice at all - the only options being to either
accept or refuse the offer that is given to you.
Two options: take it or leave it; that’s ‘Hobson’s choice’.
The expression is best known in the UK, but became
used worldwide following the successful eponymous
1954 film starring Charles Laughton.
There is a story that this expression comes from a Mr.
Hobson who hired out horses and gave his customers
no choice as to which horse they could take. This has
all the credentials of a ‘folk etymology’ myth but, in this
case, the derivation is correct.
A search of Google returns several thousand hits for
‘Hobbesian choice’. The mistaken uses of that phrase, in
place of the correct ‘Hobson’s choice’, originate from a
confusion between the celebrated philosopher Thomas
Hobbes (who, incidentally, was the originator of another
commonplace phrase - ‘nasty, brutish and short’) and
the less well-known carrier Thomas Hobson, to whom
the phrase refers.
Thomas Hobson (1545–1631) ran a thriving carrier and
horse rental business in Cambridge, England, around
the turn of the 17th century. Hobson rented out horses,
mainly to Cambridge University students, but refused
to hire them out other than in the order he chose. The
choice his customers were given was ‘this or none’; quite
literally, not their choice but Hobson’s choice.
The phrase was already being described as proverbial
less than thirty years after Hobson’s death. The Quaker
scholar Samuel Fisher referred to the phrase in his
religious text, The Rustick’s Alarm to the Rabbies, 1660:
business, which shows clearly how the phrase came into
being:
“He lived in Cambridge, and observing that the
Scholars rid hard, his manner was to keep a large
Stable of Horses, ... when a Man came for a Horse, he
was led into the Stable, where there was great Choice,
but he obliged him to take the Horse which stood next
to the Stable-Door; so that every Customer was alike
well served according.”
After his death in 1631, Hobson was remembered in verse
by no less a figure than John Milton, saying “He had bin
an immortall Carrier”. That seems rather a strange thing
to say just after he had died. Eighty-six was a very good
innings in the 17th century, but hardly immortality.
The phrase was still well enough known in the 20th
century for ‘hobsons’ to be adopted then as Cockney
rhyming slang for ‘voice’. It has no connection with the
similar sounding ‘Hobs ۋR