Barbara in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, wonders whether her mother’s favorite warning that a crowded place would be “a mob scene” was a family invention. The expression has been around since at least the late 1800s and comes from theater, where it denotes a scene with many people onstage. Mob is a shortening of Latin mobile vulgus, “the fickle common people,” with mobile related to mobile and vulgus to vulgar in the sense “common.” Jonathan Swift once scorned mob as a barbarous monosyllable, part of a long tradition of objecting to shortened words. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Theatrical Origin of “Mob Scene””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi.
Hi, who’s this?
This is Barbara Murray, and I’m calling from Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California.
Well, hello, Barbara. Nice to talk to you.
Hi, Barbara.
What’s up?
Hi, it’s great to talk to you guys, too.
What can we do for you?
Well, I have a question about a phrase that my mom always used, and I never heard anyone else use it, and it got to be kind of a family joke.
So now when we use it, we use it like in a joking kind of way because we thought it was such a silly phrase.
So she would always say whenever she thought we were going someplace, like I grew up in Northern California in the Bay Area.
So like when we had to go over to San Francisco and she knew it was going to be crowded, she would be like, oh, I really don’t want to go.
It’s going to be a mob scene.
And so that was her favorite.
She would always call things that she didn’t even know for sure, but anything she thought was going to be crowded.
She called it a mob scene.
And my kids picked it up, and it just became a family joke.
So now when we talk about going anywhere, we’re like, oh, God, should we go?
It’s going to be a mob scene.
Why is it funny?
Just because it’s employed so often?
To me, it always sounded like I didn’t know where she got the phrase.
I never heard anyone else say it.
And it sounds vaguely sinister, but the way she said it, it didn’t really sound scary.
But I always pictured like the scene in the old Frankenstein movie where the crowd is storming the castle with flaming torches.
That was what I pictured when she said mob scene.
So I just, you know, I wanted to know what was the real origin of the phrase.
Do other people use this? Did she make it up?
Oh, no, it’s been around for quite a while since since at least the late 1800s mob scene.
And it referred to kind of the kind of scene that you’re talking about.
Just it comes from the world of theater and a whole bunch of people coming on stage.
You know, that big climactic scene.
So like a crowd scene.
Yeah, yeah, a crowd scene.
Only somehow the word mob makes it sound more horrible or bigger.
Well, it has developed nuances over the centuries since it first really popped into the English language, depending on the context.
So sometimes mob is negative and automatically implies violence or danger.
Yeah.
Yeah, which it was not in her case.
It was just, I mean, she wasn’t, I would not say that she was in any scientific sense agoraphobic.
She just didn’t like to go any place that was crowded, even though she constantly had to.
And so she would just always use that phrase.
And like I said, now it’s a family joke.
I love the word mob, too, because it comes from the Latin mobile vulgus, which means the changeable common people.
The fickle common people.
The mobile is like mobile.
It’s related to mobile and move.
And the vulgus is like vulgar.
But not vulgar as in obscene.
Vulgar as in common.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, so the mobile vulgus was the common people.
The crowd that would sing Hosanna one day and crucify him the next.
A mob isn’t necessarily bad.
It’s just a whole lot of people.
Yeah, and disorganized.
A mob, you never call soldiers on parade a mob because they’re in rinks and rows, right?
Right.
They’re very organized, whereas a mob is just a bunch of people milling around.
Right.
You’re doing your own thing.
Maybe part of what my mother didn’t like was just a whole ton of disorganized people.
Right.
Yeah, I’m picturing all the extras in a movie scene or on stage, you know, saying peas and carrots, peas and carrots,
Or whatever it is that they say to simulate crowd noise, steamboat rhubarb.
Well, that’s great.
I just, you know, as I said, I have really never heard anyone else use it, and I didn’t know if she had made it up or if it was a real thing.
And I just, I love that it’s become a joke thing.
It’s really one of those eye-rolling things now in the family.
Yeah.
So I think she would be happy to know we’re carrying it on for her.
Well, yeah, and now I’m going to think of her whenever I hear that term.
Good.
Well, my mom was a great person.
That’s great, Barbara.
Barbara, thank you for your call.
We really appreciate it.
Okay.
You have a great day.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
We’ve talked about this on the show before, how words that are now ordinary were once condemned as horrible.
Oh, yeah.
And mob was one of those words.
So as early as 1710, Jonathan Swift and other people described the word mob as terrible.
It was a shortened form of the Latin phrase.
And he said, it’s the result of a natural tendency towards relapsing into barbarity, which delights in monosyllables.
So this criticism of shortening words, which is a perfectly ordinary way to make new words in English, is at least 300 years old.
A long tradition.
A natural tendency towards relapsing into barbarity.
That is the human condition, isn’t it?
If he had pearls, he would have been clutching them, right?
Yes.
