Hanging up the telephone in old-time Phoenix


I was trying to explain what "Wi-Fi" is to a friend of mine today, who is interested in getting up to speed with the latest technology, and as I listened to myself try to explain, it occurred to me that there are a lot of terms that we use without really thinking about it, and later on I thought about the phrase "hanging up the telephone".

As a man, ahem, "of age", I've hung up many telephones in my day. That is, I've put the receiver on a little hanger, and when I did so, the connection ended. But while hanging up telephones ended a LONG time ago, the phrase "hang up" is still around. So when you hang up your phone nowadays, there's no hook to hang it on, you simply push a button that disconnects you.

But the language persists, and we still say, "Hey, she hung up on me!", which I guess sounds better than, "She pushed the little red button on her cell phone on me!"

Thank you for letting me discuss my telephone hangups in old-time Phoenix!













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