Thomas Hobson was his name, a licensed carrier of passengers, letters, and parcels between Cambridge and London in the years surrounding 1600. He kept horses for such purpose, and rented them when he wasn’t using them. Naturally, the students all wanted the best horses, and as a result, Mr. Hobson’s better mounts became badly overworked. To remedy this situation, he began a strict rotation system, giving each customer the choice of taking the horse nearest the stable door or none at all. This rule became known as Hobson’s Choice, and soon people were using that term to mean “no choice at all” in all kinds of situations.
Not to be confused with Sophie’s Choice, the title of a 1979 novel by William Styron, about a Polish woman in a Nazi concentration camp who was forced to decide which of her two children would live and which would die. That phrase has become shorthand for a terrible choice between two difficult options.
Both Choices come to mind when reading this week’s Boston Globe article titled Hope for Devastating Child Disease Comes at a Cost: $750,000 a Year. The headline, as is too often the case, is inaccurate. It’s $750,000 for the first year, and $375,000 annually after that. But let us not quibble. That equals a lot of resource.
