What do you call it when you’re out in public with friends but they’re all staring at their own cell phones? A listener from Santa Monica, California, suggests that the word techgether. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Techgether”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
The other night I went to a performance at a theater here in San Diego.
And a few minutes before the lights went down, I thought, well, I’ll check in on Facebook and see if I can connect with people here.
And so I got all absorbed in doing that, and then I glanced up, and I realized that every single person in my immediate proximity was all absorbed in looking at their smartphones.
And I just thought, there’s something wrong with that.
You know, I mean, here’s this communal situation, and we’re all staring at our phones.
And the next day, we got an email from Gina Conti.
She’s in Santa Monica, California.
She had the very same experience, and she coined a word that she’d like to popularize.
It’s tech-gather.
Tech-gather.
Tech-gather, you know?
We’re all tech-gather in this situation where we’re all these little human silos, you know?
And next to each other, communing with somebody in a device, but not the people sitting next to you.
Exactly.
The little glowing screens.
The people whose very breath that you are about to inhale because they just exhaled it, you’re not participating in it otherwise.
But this reminds me of one of my favorite practices that I’ve seen people do now is that when everybody comes to a party or dinner, they stack their phones.
And the first one to reach for their phone pays.
Oh, that’s nice.
The phone stack.
Is there a word for that?
The phone stack?
It’s phone stacking.
I don’t know.
But yeah, the first one to reach for their phone pays.
Okay.
So like a key party only.
The problem is that means you can’t leave because you’ve got to reach for your phone to leave.
I like that.
If you’ve got a word for what happens when we’re all sitting together in a room by ourselves, but together, looking at our phones, give us a call, 877-929-9673.
Email us, words@waywordradio.org.
We want to talk to you about language, speech, grammar, dialect, slang, jargon, you name it.
Techgether can also be called “cellfish” (taken from http://www.boredpanda.com/modern-word-combinations-urban-dictionary/ which has some other great words for modern phenomena like “unkeyboardinated” and “textpectation”