In the annals of both new-to-me words and innovative crimes we have the term flash mob robbery. Last November, about 80 people simultaneously ran into a Nordstrom store in San Francisco, grabbed bunches of merchandise, and then ran out and escaped in 25 waiting cars. Although a few participants were nabbed, most got away.
This type of crime is also called a flash rob (clever), mob thefts (reasonable), or in the vernacular of law enforcement, mass theft or mass robbery (boring).
The idea of overwhelming the victims with sheer numbers isn’t new. Of course, mobs have been around forever. Calling such a thing a flash mob robbery or flash rob, though, and perhaps organizing it in this way, seem to be relatively recent.
Obviously, the terms are based on flash mob, which involves people getting together in public “for the purpose of doing an unusual or entertaining activity of short duration,” to quote Dictionary.com. The term flash mob has been around since at least the early 2000s. This seems to coincide roughly with when phone-based social media became widespread, which then became a technological enabler, so to speak, of organizing something like a group dance or musical performance.
It’s not a huge leap from getting 100 people together to perform “Thriller” in public to getting a gang of folks together like this to do some crimes. Incidents of flash robbing go back to not long after the term flash mob appeared. The first Urban Dictionary entry for flash rob is from 2009. A blog post from 2011 by “the security girl” warns retailers about how to protect themselves from flash robs.
As a crime, flash robbing seems to be popular; there’s an article in the Washington Post today about a wave of flash robs. As terms, flash mob robbery and flash mob will probably stay around as long as people are still organizing these mass thefts.
Origins. I was reading an article not long ago that as an aside made this claim: “The word ‘gimmick’ is believed to come from ‘gimac,’ an anagram of ‘magic.'” This was in the New Yorker, which has a reputation for good fact-checking. Still, people make a lot of claims about etymology that don’t always prove to be true.
The idea that gimmick is an anagram of magic is definitely one theory about the origin of the term. The journal Words in 1936 noted that the word gimac (i.e., gimmick) “is an anagram of the word magic, and is used by magicians the same way as others use the word ‘thing-a-ma-bob.’” The OED says the origin of gimmick is unknown, but lists it as US slang and points readers at this cite from the Words journal.
An alternative theory is that gimmick emerged from the word gimcrack, which might go back to an Old French word for “a slight or flimsy ornament.” Versions of gimcrack were used in the 17th and 18th centuries (not just in the US) to refer to gadgets or knick-knacks. (1709: “My Eye was diverted by Ten Thousand Gimcracks round the Room.”) In his entry for gimmick, Douglas Harper has a cite from 1910 (“I twisted the gimmick attached to the radiator”) that seems a lot like the “gadget” sense of gimcrack.
Gimmick took on a specialized use in the argot of carnies who ran fairway games. An article in Scientific American from 1923 describes how a carnie can manipulate a game to make it more easy or less easy to win. “A trick of this sort,” the article says, “is called a gimmick or a gouge.”
In an article in American Speech (Feb 1949), the author and magician Sid Fleischman notes that the word gimmick started appearing in a magicians’ catalog about 1930 “to describe any article secretly brought into play during a [magician’s] trick.” He deduces that the word wasn’t in wide use in magic circles before then.
Fleischman discounts the idea that gimmick derives from an anagram, contradicting the origin proposed in the Words journal:
Since gimac is an anagram of magic, many writers of magic in the early thirties preferred that spelling, and most magicians believed that to be the source of the word. Actually, of course, the term had been borrowed, probably from the carnival man’s lexicon, and has since passed into the general idiom.
One problem with Fleishman’s explanation, though, is that gimmick was in use in the general idiom before magicians used it.
While looking for information about gimmick, I ran across a usage that I’d never heard, where it was used to describe not a gadget, but a person. In a story that was serialized in the Seattle Daily Times (January 26, 1930), one of the characters says, “I’ve seen some cheap babies in my time, but this gimmick Thornton is the champ.” Green’s Dictionary of Slang lists one meaning of gimmick as “a foolish person,” with the excellent example “a person who has been mulcted by cults, healers, fortune-tellers or mystics.”
As it happens, gimcrack was also used to describe people (1637: “Lady, I pitie you..this [fellow] is a Gincracke, That can get nothing but new fashions on you.”). Ben Franklin used gimcrack to describe someone with a mechanical bent. As with the overlapping “gadget” senses of gimcrack and gimmick, it’s tempting to therefore assume that the terms are cousins or even siblings.
I’m inclined to think that the explanation in the New Yorker (magic > gimac > gimmick), while defensible based on available sources, is probably not correct. There are just too many other instances of gimmick to think that the word has such a neat explanation. A problem with etymology, sadly, is that it’s sometimes kind of messy.
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