cell
Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 | tags: English evolution, on the phone |
The biological term ‘cell’ was coined by Robert Hook, most famous for the eponymous Hooks law and working as Sir Christopher Wren’s colleage on St. Pauls Cathedral and a substantial proportion of London after the great fire. Evidently Robert Hook meant to leverage the connotations of a monks cell, one of many defined spaces with an identical yet sparse functional content.
cell phones are named after the cellular network that supplies the signal, possibly the term cell has the same root in a monks cell. Two very diverse current-use meanings (phone, biological component) stemming from one original use. Possibly…
