From Michael Palmer on Facebook, a link to this excellent story (from the Messy Nessy site on the 5th: “Calling on her Cell Phone in 1922: The Home-O-Phone”:
Note that the receiver has to be grounded; that’s what the fire hydrant in the picture is for.
In any case, Michael sent it to me for its play on homophone: homophone – Home-O-Phone, get it?
My principal interest in uses of homophone comes from the astonishing number of times homophone and homophobe are confused, in both directions (so the topic combines my interest in both language play and gay matters). See my 3/11/11 posting “Homophones”. But also my 1/27/14 posting “Homophonophobia”, about a horror at homophones.
May 10, 2016 at 11:17 pm |
From John Lawler on Facebook:
May 11, 2016 at 12:25 am |
$24 in 1922 is roughly $340 in 2016 dollars — not cheap, especially for a device that does nothing but receive radio transmissions (no e-mail, no web searches, no photography).
May 11, 2016 at 10:33 am |
From Robert Coren in the lgbt precinct of Facebook:
A reading I unaccountably seem not to have posted about: as a N + N compound homo phone ‘phone belonging to a homo, phone for a homo’.