Curiosity Corner: The Telephone Booth

Curiosity Corner

By Dr. Jerry D. Wilson,

Emeritus Professor of Physics, Lander University

 I read something the other day in the Washington Post that I hadn’t given much thought. The telephone booth is a dying breed, if not already dead. Shutting the booth door for privacy was the thing, and calls traced to phone booths were anonymous (in detective stories). Those were the days. What are 007 and Jason Bourne going to do? Get shoe phones like Maxwell Smart, I guess.

Seriously, there are a couple of reasons for the disappearance. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, phone booths no longer met the national accessibility standards. Also, the cost lead phone companies to start putting in small cubicles rather than booths. By the year 2000, all new public phone installations were in accessible cubicles or on pedestals.

But alas, pay phones in general are vanishing. There were more than 2 million pay phones in the United States in 2000, but just over 1 million by 2006. There may be 100,000 today. If someone asked you where the closest pay phone is, could you tell them?

You no doubt know the reason for the decline of pay phones (and land lines)… cell phones. During the period from 2000-2006, when the pay phones decreased by a million, cell phone use in the country jumped from 90.6 million to 217.4 million according to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Today, that number is around 330 million. They’re everywhere! Even at the dinner table, and when people are driving cars (but Bluetooth helps here).

Well, enough about phones. Let’s talk about words. One that I began thinking about recently is  “high” and how it is used extensively throughout our vocabulary. Here are a few, and you can probably think of more:

High jump, high and dry, highbrow, high powered, high class, high fidelity, high society, highway, high top boots, high hat, high school, high faloot’n, knee high (to a grasshopper), high seas, highballs, high road (I’ll take the…), high on drugs, high blood pressure, high hope, high and mighty, high beam, high energy physics.

There, that’s a high enough word count for this column.

C.P.S. (Curious Postscript): “I’m not worried about the national debt. It’s big enough to take care of itself.” –Ronald Reagan, who also said, “There are advantages to being elected president. The day after I was elected, I had my high school grades classified top secret.”

Curious about something? Send your questions to Dr. Jerry D. Wilson, College of Science and Mathematics, Lander University, Greenwood, SC 29649, or email jerry@curiosity-corner.net. Selected questions will appear in the Curiosity Corner. For Curiosity Corner background, go to www.curiosity-corner.net.   Picture from https://www.supermanhomepage.com/