Who Is to Blame for the Term ‘Kangaroo Court’?
Etymology and Sources
Listening to Donald Trump, not noted for literary acumen, whinge about ‘Kangaroo Courts’ has made me realise that everyone must know the phrase as the ultimate in judicial pejoratives. What did kangaroos do to deserve this reputation? The collective noun for a group of kangaroos is ‘a mob,’ but far from riotous, it is usually very sleepy.
A big male red kangaroo will likely stare you down, eye to eye, on a trail, but the response is awe rather than fear. Boxing kangaroos are adolescent showoffs rather than malevolent toughs. Australia’s national symbol never should have become colloquial for mob justice. Where did this calumny come from?
I blame the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which cites: ‘origin US, improperly constituted court having no legal standing,’ blithely references a mid-west satirical tome, ‘A Stray Yankee in Paris’ by Samuel Adams Hammett, published 1853. This is from the Second Edition of the OED, published in 1989. I don’t have access to the first edition, published successively from 1888 to 1928. Volume 5 ‘H to K’ was published in 1901, and I suspect the 2nd Edition citation was not updated.
