The public disturbances in Clapham, achieved by social media link-ups, have their precedents. ‘You can imagine what an exhilarating week this has been,’ wrote Harold Nicolson in 1945, ‘The surrounding of Berlin; the link-up with the Russian armies.’
Link-up, first recorded from 1945 by the Oxford English Dictionary, has since been applied chiefly to military connection and that of spacecraft.
On the same day as the first Clapham disturbance, three ‘flash mobs’, as they called themselves, were honestly busy in Slough High Street, doing little dances and holding up placards calling for the place to be named UK Town of Culture 2028.
This outbreak belonged to a slightly old-fashioned trend that began in 2003 for crowds suddenly to materialise to do something attention-seeking, such as the flash mob at Grand Central Station.
By chance flash mob shared a name with the petty criminals exemplified Henry Twiss, ‘one of the flash mob’, charged in London in 1832 with stealing silver coins and a purse. Since the 17th century flash coves had lived in flash cribs and spoke a flash cant.
Of course mob was a triumphant apocopation of mobile vulgus, coined in the 18th century during a vogue for abbreviations. Others, like incog, have not lasted.
An alternative to flash mob was invented by the American critic Howard Rheingold, whose book Smart Mobs (2002) ranged wider than groups organised by mobile phone.
Before mobile phones, steaming gangs, first named in Hackney in 1987, depended on pre-digital communications.
At the moment, ‘Link me up, Scotty’ is a humorous way of requesting a website’s URL, based on a line in Star Trek, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’, which according to experts (who proliferate) was never uttered in that form. It is too soon to tell if link-up will establish itself as a name for a call to mob action.
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