"MESS OF POTTAGE."
[To THE EiiO5 OF THE "SPECTATOR.") STR,—It is some comfort to find home-keeping Englishmen speculating as to the origin of homely phrases in our mixed and wayward speech. For English spreads apace, "une tache d'huile qui s'etend tAmijours," and becomes the lingua franca of peoples who lack the etymological sense of its significance. You may imagine how the foreign compositor is puzzled by some of our locutions. For instance, in a generous list of errata prefixed to a book recently published in Calcutta I find "for ' pot of message' read 'mess of pottage." A little further
on occurs the quaint expression, "fat and bludull-witted." Another frequent source of neologiams is the temptation to translate too literally from languages more subtly idiomatic than ours. The villain of an Indian novel recently rendered' into English, "grinned so widely that all his teeth came out." Indians make much good-natured fun of the Englishman's attempts to use their subtle and elusive vernaculars. The laugh is not all on one side, since linguistic infirmity is not confined to any one race. There is no harm, surely, in being amused at foreign blunders, so long as we cheerfully admit that we are capable of errors at least as amusingly inexplic-
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