‘Mobilingua’ Adds Momentum to Conversations

The word “mobilingua,” coined by Bill Wilkinson of Calabasas, has been embraced by other readers to describe conversational deficiencies other than those between spouses.

Wilkinson, you may remember, defined mobilingua as the breakdown that occurs when one spouse is speaking and the other suddenly darts off to quiet a singing teakettle, or whatever.

Mobilingua is a common domestic phenomenon known to all people who have been married for longer than two weeks, I suspect, but it also has other applications in life, some of them ominous.

Simply put, mobilingua is the act of disconnecting in mid-conversation, for whatever reason. One dashes off, or one’s eyes glaze over and one stops listening.

Melvin Lennard of Pacific Palisades, an arbitrator, describes an occurrence of mobilingua that affected an entire crew of flight attendants simultaneously. Takeoff had been delayed several hours, and when the plane was finally airborne the captain announced over the public-address system that all drinks would be on the house.

However, after the first round was served, the purser told the attendants to charge for any beyond that. They did, and gave the money to the purser, who neglected to turn it over to the airline, which thereafter fired him. Lennard was arbitrator in a resulting labor dispute between the attendants’ union and the airline.

“When I questioned the flight attendants separately about why they had not challenged the purser’s instructions to charge for drinks which the captain had announced would be free,” he said, “each replied that he or she always tuned out everything in the (captain’s) public address announcements ‘except safety matters.’

“I sometimes worry about this asserted talent to automatically and selectively tune in or out predetermined types of messages. I guess it exists, but it makes me nervous.”

Yet, I can sympathize with the attendants. It must be boring to hear the captain deliver the same travel patter day after day: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now passing over the Grand Canyon, on your right. We should be landing in Los Angeles at 5:45 p.m.”

Anyone who has ever sat in an airport for hours waiting for a flight knows how demoralizing it can be to be subjected to that ceaseless drone of amplified announcements. One is tuned in only for one’s own flight number or destination. They might announce the end of the world without arousing any anxiety.

Sylvain Fribourg writes that mobilingua has actually been diagnosed and given a clinical name. When after two years of happy marriage her older sister and her husband discovered that he wasn’t hearing her, the worried couple consulted a hearing specialist.

After making numerous physical tests and taking a detailed personal history, the specialist told Fribourg’s brother-in-law that he was suffering from a condition for which there was no known surgical or pharmacological therapy, but which was not life-threatening and which might cure itself in time. He called it “marotitis.”

“It was only after I had completed medical school, some years later,” Fribourg said, “that I realized ‘marotitis’ was not a diagnosis to be found in any extant medical text.”

One may assume that “marotitis” is a type of mobilingua that is limited to married couples.

John Degatina, meanwhile, adds a conversational device to those I have previously identified as the Interrogative Putdown (“What are you doing?”) and the Declarative Question (“I met you at the Daltons’?”). The one he adds is the practice of answering a question with a question.

“If someone asks, ‘What time is it?’ and the answer is, ‘You mean now?’ Or an equally innocent example is, ‘Did you feed the cat?’ If the answer is, ‘Do you mean our cat?’ the first person will say something weird and unfriendly, like, ‘No, you idiot. I mean William F. Buckley Jr.’s cat.’ ”

I agree with Degatina that this is merely an innocent response, and not an insidious conversational ploy. The question for a question is quite common in the conversation of romantic young couples.

“Do you love me?”

“Do you love me ?”

This is merely a playful exchange between dreamy sweethearts whose hormones are talking. It cannot be regarded as serious or intelligent conversation.

Two years later, though, it may have come to this.

“Do you still love me?”

“Did you say something?”

By then, mobilingua will have set in.