you suffer from restless nights of tossing and turning, you may have a case of the mollycobwobbles. A listener shares this hand-me-down term from her grandmother. Grant explains she may well have combined two English terms dating about 150 years back: mulligrubs and collywobbles. The aptly named affliction usually consisted of the jitters, the shakes, or even the yips. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Mollycobwobbles”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Emily in Dallas.
Hey there, Emily. What’s up?
Well, I am a proud word nerd, and so I know I’m in good company here.
Yeah, that’s three of us.
I’ve got one that’s got me stumped.
Okay.
All right.
It’s a word my mother used when I was a little girl, and she told me that her mother used it when she was a little girl.
And the word is, well, it’s two words.
It’s the Molly Cobb wobbles.
Molly like a name, Cobb like a salad, and Wobble like I’m wobbling.
Molly Cobb Wobbles.
And what does it mean?
How would she use it?
The Molly Cobb Wobbles are an affliction.
It’s something that happens to you when you can’t sleep at night, and you toss and you turn, and you still can’t sleep.
And I think there’s something with movement involved, like you’re moving around.
And so if you wake up and you’ve had a bad night, and you haven’t slept and you’ve talked and you’ve turned, you’ve had the Molly Cobb Wobbles.
The Molly Cobb Wobbles.
Sounds terrible.
It does.
I’m going to start a ribbon campaign.
What color is your ribbon going to be?
Zebra stripes.
Molly Cobb Wobbles.
And you use it, and your mother used it, and who else used it?
My grandmother.
My mother’s mother used it.
The same exact way, huh?
There’s no variation?
No, there’s no variation.
And I talked to my grandmother recently and asked her where she picked it up, and she has no clue.
And you and your people are all from Dallas?
My parents, my mother’s Topeka, Kansas, and her mother grew up in Wichita, Kansas.
We have an answer, but what we’re marveling at here is that this is a form of this that we’ve never heard before.
Okay.
Yeah, it seems like two words that we know Frankenstein together, if that’s what you’re thinking.
I am, yeah.
A portmanteau of sorts.
A portmanteau of sorts.
You are a word nerd.
I know it.
I know it.
Let’s see if she can do the secret handshake.
Excellent. Well done, Emily.
It’s the miming of opening a dictionary.
But actually, this one is a little bit of a stopper for you, I bet, because when you Googled this, you were like, huh?
And you came up with almost nothing, right?
Right, almost nothing.
I got molly wobbles, but I didn’t really get much for that either.
Did you find molly grub and collywobbles?
No, I didn’t.
That is the more standard form of it.
Two words, molly grubs, M-U-L-L-I-G-R-U-B-S, and collywobbles, C-O-L-L-Y-W-O-B-B-L-E-S.
Mully grubs and collywobbles.
Wow.
This is kind of like the jitters or the shakes and maybe a little bit of the heebie-jeebies thrown in there, a little bit of the yips even, right?
It’s just kind of like nervousness or it could be upset stomach.
Yeah, that’s what I think, a rumbly stomach.
Perfect example, before your first day of school for the new year, it’s like, what is my new class going to be like? Will I like my teacher? All my friends are going to be there?
It’s that kind of nervousness.
Okay, gotcha.
How they got put together.
Yeah. Mully grubs I think of as more of a state of depression or low spirits. And collie wobbles, I heard my Aunt Mazo use that in North Carolina and it meant an upset stomach, sort of like colic.
Yeah, or butterflies in the stomach even. There’s a lot of variations that almost both of these kind of together involve just, you aren’t yourself.
You’ve got an unsettled feeling.
You’re not really sick, but you feel queasy or nervous or just kind of, eh.
You’re not feeling strong at that moment.
Yeah, you don’t have a firm diagnosis.
Yeah, yeah.
Sort of self-diagnosis.
A little bit of malaise, maybe.
Yeah.
Wow.
So separately, these two words, now that we know the two component parts that you Frankenstein together into one, collywobbles dates at least back to the 1800s.
Molly grubs, depends on whose etymology you trust, could go back as far as the 1400s is another word called magrims, which means a headache or a migraine and plus a dozen other things.
But in general, both of these words as a pair go back a good 150 years.
Well, I think the family has roots going back to England at some point.
So maybe it came across there, but I’m not sure.
It could have, but somewhere along the way, those words got married in your family.
They got married in my family.
I’ve been known to make up words myself, so maybe I get it from somewhere.
Linguistic inbreeding there.
Right.
Own it, you know?
I will.
Work it.
I’ll fly my nerd word flag high.
Yeah, thanks, Emily, for calling.
That’s right.
Thank you guys so much.
Give our best to your mother and grandmother, who must also be big word nerds.
Exactly.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
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