While I have no doubt that to Jones doesn't derive from keeping up with the Joneses, some people may associate them because of the Boz Scaggs song "Lowdown":
You ain't got to be so bad got to be so cold
This dog eat dog existence sure is getting old
Got to have a Jones for this Jones for that
This running with the Joneses boy
Just ain't where it's at
You gonna come back around
To the sad sad truth the dirty lowdown
(As for "spider" meaning a long-handled skillet, I wonder if any Southern cooks have put a spider under a salamander.)
"A collection of Bethlehem, Pa., slang from 1988 contains such gems as first, meant to be used interchangeably with just, as in "She is first eight years old,"
I wonder if this isn't some sort of older Proto-Germanic construction. In modern German, you can use "erst" (first) to mean just in the same kind of context:
Sie ist erst acht Jahre alt. (She is just eight years old)
The sort of stipulation or requirement that applies here is that it's not exactly the same meaning as just as in only, but has some sort of reference to the very beginning of the event or change and the idea that there are things to come after. In this case, that would mean not that she is only eight years old, but that she has just turned eight years old.
Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock from Big Bang Theory http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kov2G0GouBw
Re: root / rout
On Whose Line Is It Anyway, there's a game called "Songs of the..." where someone makes up the title of a song, and someone else has to improvise and sing the song. In one, they named the song "You're not on my route," and pronounced it "root". Then, to try to trip up the singer, they changed the pronounciation to "rout". The singer worked both pronounciations into his song.
In terms of "fear of losing cel phone", it's too bad that "dysphon(e)ia" already names something else.