Then why don’t they call the hands-free device a mouse?
“Lookit that douche walkin’ down the street with a mouse in his ear!”
Why is the wireless communication protocol called “bluetooth” (as long as we’re on the subject)?
I guess that makes me a douche. I use mine primarily to listen to music.
You listen to music in ONE ear?
Ooookay, I guess.
Huh. I nuked mine.
Nope. I use one of them fancy-pants stereo headsets.
No idea, but it existed for quite a while with no real application. One application finally becomes a market success, and now we have a lame pitting about it.
To hell with fifteen years, it’s pretty much commonly accepted now. I’ll make a bolder prediction: within five years somehow ‘bluetooth’ will be a verb.
And only then will fusoya be able to do a proper pitting, and one I will probably agree with. Unless it turns out I like bluetoothing.
Aw, hell, let’s make it two years. If I like bluetoothing, I want to get started sooner.
Bluetooth, eh? Give me a moment to wiki it.
I do believe that is an analogous case.
But the real answer is mix yourself gin and tonics until the irritation goes away. (Note: This plan may be bad for your liver if you have a history of stubbornness.)
I give this rant an F- for being on a topic that doesn’t interest me at all on a personal level. Next time, consider what *I *would want to read, and go with that.
Funny that you’re anal about the word Bluetooth but you use “cell phone” when you should probably use “mobile phone.”
Yeah, but Bluetooth is brutally cool, and hands free device is tragically lame. That’s why they named it Bluetooth in the first place; it’s not like it ever had, you know, blue teeth, and shit.
Welcome to the English language, where brevity and easily identifiable markers (like the Bluetooth protocol), determine what things are called, not whatever is most technically precise.
Sorry OP, you lose.
In Spanish, at least, nobody calls them any other way.
I was making a delivery at Tektronix circa 1998-99 and they had a display for something called “Bluetooth” and it caught my eye because I wondered if it had anything to do with Harald Bluetooth and according to the poster it did–but that’s all I remember about it, I don’t for the life of me recall why a communications protocol had anything to do with a first millenium Danish king but Wikipediahas the following to say:
So I guess it actually makes sense.
Bolding mine.
Amen. I was going to say something much snarkier and meaner, but this pretty much sums it up.
I’m not so sure about this. It seems to me that both Xerox and Bluetooth are metonymies, that is, calling something by something it’s related to. Xerox is closely related to photocopies, and Bluetooth is closely related to those little bulby things people put in their ears. Once usage gets “settled,” it doesn’t really matter that Xerox also makes printers and that keyboards can use Bluetooth.
Actually you should use the term “wireless phone”. That’s been the proper term since the phones were the size of a Thermos!
Yeah, they do. Customers ask for them by a huge variety of names, and it’s not uncommon to hear “Where do you keep the USBs?”
I fear the Great Educationally Unwashed have outpaced your vocabulary preferences.
Google* “bluetooth” and see for yourself how often it’s used for that hands-free cell phone thingy. Or enter “bluetooth” on Amazon and see how many of the hits are for the “hands-free device.”
See, here’s a tip, Grandpa: words can mean more than one thing, language evolves, and the incompetent, undereducated polloi are the ones that force it to evolve, pedants notwithstanding. One can make an argument the polloi are ahead of us all, from the standpoint of language evolution.
*Google, e.g., is rapidly becoming a verb as well as a company.