A Video Chatting Mapping Music Player by Any Other Name...

As US Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts recently wrote, “[Cell phones] could just as easily be called cameras, video players, Rolodexes, calendars, tape recorders, libraries, diaries, albums, televisions, maps or newspapers.”  Maybe it's time we came up with a new word for them.

As you might expect (since I'm bothering to write and post this), I have a proposal. In Edward Lear's The Owl and The Pussycat, he references the "runcible spoon".  The term is used nonsensically, abd has come to have many meanings.  I've heard it used most to indicate the combination spoon/fork (and sometimes knife) better known a
round here as a "spork".

Just as a spork is not a spoon, nor a fork, and just as it may or may not have a cutting edge, the modern device now called a "cell phone" is not a telephone, nor a camera, not a music player, and it may or may not have the ability to function as a navigation device, an internet hotspot, or any number of other uses.

It therefore seems quite suitable to refer to the erstwhile "cell phone" as the "runcible telephone" or more succinctly the "runcible".  This use of the term is similar to the use of the word "runcible" to refer to an educational book that was more than it seemed to be in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.

Runcible, noun.  A handheld device combining multiple modes of communication into a single unit.  For example, a device which combines the uses of atelephone, video phone, GPS receiver, camera, video player, mapping service, personal planner, internet browser, music player and so forth.