Transcript of “How Do You Pronounce Mobile? City, Dangler, or Phone?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Grant.
Hi, Martha.
This is Constance from San Antonio, Texas.
So my 17-month-old over her bed has a decorative structure, I guess, that hangs from a string and spins around, you know, when touched or when there’s an air current.
So she’s deep in the stage of pointing at things and asking, what’s that? And every time she asks me and points at this thing and asks, what’s that? I never know if it’s a mobile or a mobile or a mobile.
And so she told me, you know, mom, it sounds like you need to call A Way with Words to find this out because this is getting ridiculous.
I’m hearing a discrepancy there.
A child lying on their back watching a mobile does not have that kind of fluency in English.
Mom, are you putting words in her mouth?
A little bit, a little bit.
Good for you.
Yeah.
And so I even asked, I even have a group of friends kind of from all over the U.S., pulled them, and everybody had a different answer for me as to what they call it.
What’s your instinct? Like, if you weren’t to think too hard about it, what would you say first?
I would say either mobile or mobile, I think. Actually, I think mobile is my first instinct.
Mobile.
Okay, yeah.
So I hung over the bed.
A mobile.
Okay.
And then I correct myself to mobile instinctively.
It’s really between those two, I think.
Or you could just say sculpture.
There we go.
Well, yeah, the word has a really interesting history because since the 15th century, the adjective spelled M-O-B-I-L-E was around meaning not stationary or movable. And it came from French. And in the UK, it was pronounced mobile. And then later in the United States, it was pronounced either mobile or mobile. Now that’s the adjective that means it’s not stationary.
In the early 1930s, Alexander Calder, this sculptor, was fooling around with kinetic sculptures, you know, exactly like you described, you know, pieces hung suspended from something that moved around in really random but pleasing ways. And Calder lived in Paris at the time. And the story goes that there was another artist, Duchamp, who visited his studio there in Paris in 1931, saw his abstract sculpture that moved around and called it a mobile, which in French means movable. And so that was the original pronunciation of these works of art. They were mobiles.
And then when the crib toy came along years later, people were calling it, by that time, they were calling it mobile in the U.S. But the pronunciation is kind of mobile because it’s pronounced mobile in the U.K. And it’s further complicated by things like your mobile phone and all of that. But in the U.S., if you want to go by the dictionary pronunciation, it’s mobile, which I think is what you were saying.
Yeah. Yeah. I would correct myself to go to mobile. I would land there eventually.
So, yeah, I do the same thing. You know, I wouldn’t worry too much about the pronunciation, but maybe, yeah, just settle on that one and put that word in her mouth and many, many more as the years go.
And go from there.
That’s perfect.
Yeah, I hadn’t considered that.
My family is actually from France, French, real French from France, and I hadn’t made that connection this whole time.
So thank you.
That totally makes sense.
Well, thank you guys so much. I love your show, and I appreciate you guys having me on.
Well, we appreciate you, Constance.
Thanks for calling.
Take care of us.
All right.
Bye-bye.
