The word “phone” is more popular than ever, but what does it mean, now that the device the word used to refer to is all but obsolete? What does a kid of, say, under 15 years old, understand by the sound “phone” (fone? foan?) ? “Mouse” is probably more often used these days in its computer-related sense, but at least kids know there are two sorts of mice, the computer version and the little pesty animal. (Maybe some wonder which came first.) But what about “phone”? To us ancients it is short for “telephone,” which we understand to mean something like “sound at distance,” a device for communicating by voice at a distance, that being its only app for over a hundred years. Television still means “pictures at a distance,” but “phone” in that sense hardly exists any more.
“Cell phone,” short for cellular phone, was a new, freed up variety of telephone, but it did essentially the same thing, and “phone” still meant a form of “sound-distance” device. For a while, anyway. But “smart phone,” the ultimate example of mission creep, rapidly becoming the only surviving form, has become so laden with other apps—email, weather, translaters, GPS, step counting, calorie counting, clocks and alarms, etcetc—that I’m assuming these days the original meaning of “phone” of communicating by voice at a distance has become subordinate to or buried in all the other stuff it can do. (It would make almost as much sense to call a house a “phone” because one of the things you can do with it is call from it if you happen to be there when using your smart phone.) When a kid hears “phone” it must mean something more like what a servant is for those who can afford one. Phone may mean something like “the world in the palm of my hand.”
Do teachers have to explain the derivation of “phone” these days? Do kids even think to ask?
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