Flashmobs vs. Flashmobs
A note on word usage.
A search for “Chicago flash mob” gets 1,970,000 hits on Google. According to the first page of links, a flash mob is a roving band of youths who bum-rush innocent victims, beat and rob them, and disappear as quickly as they arrived. More recently, the term has been used to describe a similar style of retail robbery.
It’s not.
Unfortunately, for the past few months Chicago and national media have been incorrectly referring to these events as flash mobs.
This is a flash mob:
This is a flash mob:
This, on the other hand, is mob action, mob violence, a particularly brutal mugging, or even “wilding”:
A group of kids beating the hell out of someone, stealing their stuff, and running away already had a name. Call it that.
When you call the acts in the first two videos and the act in the last video the same thing, you confuse the audience. Journalism should be clear and precise in word choice. The goal is to communicate information accurately, right?
Because of the constant repetition of this poorly chosen phrase to describe violent acts, the original meaning has changed. A phrase that used to conjure images of random acts of organized silliness now makes the audience think of brutal beatings and mass shoplifting.
This ruins it for its original use. It’s bad writing.
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