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Why Is It Called a Pager?
Pagers have delightfully been in the news today, and it made me wonder why the device is called a pager. It seems to have nothing to do with a page of written material. So I turned to one of my favorite websites, EtymOnline, which calls itself a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English.
It turns out that pager originated in 1968 as a “device that emits a signal when activated by a telephone call.” This usage of pager in turn comes from the verb page.
This verb page means “to summon or call by name” and originated in 1904. It comes from the noun page, which has two possible derivations. The first possibility is “youth, lad; boy of the lower orders; personal servant” from about 1300, which comes from the Medieval Latin pagius meaning servant.
However, the Oxford English Dictionary has a second origin for the noun page, the Latin word pagus meaning “a boy from the rural regions.”
While Hezbollah considered that its pagers would be their servants, they failed to consider that they might in fact be the servants of the Mossad.
Thus this story of pagers exploding in the hands of Hezbollah terrorists connects us back to the medieval world of lords and knights and chivalry and pages being summoned to carry out the orders of their masters.
Published in General
Indeed.
If you’ve seen North by Northwest, you saw a detail of old time, posh life: uniformed servants who’d walk through hotel lobbies, calling out someone’s name to deliver a message. The 1930s-40s Philip Morris symbol for radio and print was a midget pageboy declaring “Call for Philip Morris-s-s-s”
Some other page references: 1966’s truly forgotten, low budget Bond ripoff The Viscount, with Kerwin Matthews (of The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, etc.) The movie begins and ends with him in the middle of a romantic tryst in a fancy hotel restaurant, until a uniformed boy with a shrill voice came up to him with a written sign, “Comte de la ROCHE”. Presumably if this had been a success, they all would have begun and ended that way.
And 1969’s Medium Cool, which I should have done a post about during the Democratic National Convention. Filmed during 1968’s explosive riots, you’d think the Left would have recalled it a month ago. But it’s inconvenient today. Maybe next year, if Kamala gets in this year.
A white TV news crew is intimidated by a mob of young blacks. They think the TV people work for the police. “What’s that radio thing on your belt?” one demands. The white kid stammers back, “That’s my, uh, pager”.
The blacks laugh. “Your, uh, pager?” they repeat, with every beat of every syllable a mocking reminder of past servitude.
Another place where “paging” was common in the past were hospitals.
Also don’t forget the Congressional pages. I went to high school with a young lady who was appointed either the first or one of the first female Congressional pages.
Still part of royal ceremony in England.
Yeah. I will never forget being in the bathroom at Northwestern Memorial as a student and hearing a pager go off.
The “code Blue” pager would play a rising series of tones ” duddely duddely do, DODDELY DODDELY DO, etc etc, followed by “Code Blue room 4120”.
When the pager went off I heard thrashing from the stall and a guy racing to get his pants on before racing out the door.
My first encounter with a pager was in the fall of 1976 when I was sitting in Philosophy 101 classroom. We were having a deep discussion on Plato’s Phaedo. Suddenly this high pitched beeping sound went off from within one of the student’s backpack. The whole class jumped. The student took out the long silver slender object, mumbled an apology and left the room. We found out later that he was a pathology assistant at the local hospital and wore the pager so that when there was an autopsy to be done they could call the team together.
I remember one of my bosses at work always carried a fully discharged pager battery. He told me when he got a page he didn’t want to answer, he’d put the dead battery in. When confronted by the person who issued the page as to why there was no response, he’d check his pager and say, “Darn it, the battery is dead again.”
Of course, we were instructed not to pull the same trick on him . . .
My personal experience with “paging” began in the 1970s (maybe late 1960s) when in public places (for some reason I recall mostly hospitals and airports) and the public address system would come on with an announcement, “Paging Dr. Smith; Paging Dr. Smith, please report to [some location i didn’t understand]” or in the airport, “Paging Mr. Phineas Jones, please pick up a white courtesy phone.”
I learned at that time about a bit of the history from before telephones and electrical communication that a “page” or “pageboy” would be sent from the manor house or an inn with a message to deliver to a business or to a person, which sometimes required the boy find the person to whom he was to deliver the message. I understand that running these types of errands was a way for boys, often from poor families to earn some money for food and maybe provide an introduction to a real job at the manor house or at one of the businesses to which he was sent with messages. I was not aware of the earlier Medieval history.
So, Congressional pages made sense as a slightly more modern version of those manor house pageboys.
I saw in old movies the depiction that a boy would sometimes be sent around a large hotel lobby or restaurant, or a resort to deliver a message to a person, perhaps calling out, “Paging Miss Eliza White; Paging Miss Eliza White.”
The public address system then substituted a mass announcement for the need for a page boy to find a specific person, so calling the announcement a “page” made sense to me.
Then when the small electronic “pagers” came out, calling them that also made sense to me, as its buzzing substituted for either a page boy coming from the manor house or other errand sender to find a particular person, or having to broadcast a widespread notice to find the person.
Early in my working days (1980s) wearing a pager was a status symbol, as it said the person was important and his services might be needed urgently. We hadn’t really thought through that it was essentially the collar end of a leash being held at the other end by some master. On the other hand, the portable electronic pager allowed people who were “on call” to go about life without having to sit by a landline telephone before the days of ubiquitous cellular telephones.
I can’t find anything in a quick search, but Ronald Reagan was trying to contact George H. W. Bush to ask him to be his running mate, and Bush was supposed to be in a certain airport. The airport paged George Bush to the courtesy phone (of whichever color), and another George Bush who happened to be in the airport answered it.
Remember Rep. Dan Crane (R – IL) and Rep. Gerry Studds (D – MA)? They admitted to having sex with underage Congressional pages back in 1983.
This led to the joke, “Q: What do Congressmen most frequently use as a bookmark? A: They don’t use bookmarks they just bend over a page.”
At one time I worked in an IT department that programmed it’s own pagers. Usually the default display was the name of the person carrying the pager. Mine said “ball and chain.”
This is a fascinating story I’d never heard before!
Your post made me wonder about the congressional page program wherein young men work as messengers in both houses of Congress. According to Wikipedia the exact date of the start of the program is not fully known although 1827 seems the most likely date, and the first use of the word “page” in this regard was around 1839.
I searched for that story online and did not find it. But I did run across this very interesting article about how Reagan ended up choosing Bush as his running mate in 1980.
I was a page for a day a couple of times in high school at our state legislature. Good work for young, energetic high school students and we got to see a bit of how the sausage is made.
Yes I remember there was worry that the young ladies would be hit on (one of the reason that some did not want to have female pages). In our innocence, we didn’t think about the young gentlemen being hit on. (Or at least I was innocent about this.)
I seem to remember the fellow was interviewed by Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show.
Like drug dealers.
Pagers, beepers, whatever. I suppose most users clip them to their belt at the hip. Will we see a run on hip replacements in Lebanon and Syria? If the now former Head of Purchasing for Hezbollah is still around, he may be getting one — and checking for a “made in Hungary” label on it.
Brilliant Mossad competence aside, we’re looking at a future where e.g. the pills some of us take every day damned well better be manufactured by and distributed through trusted “made in the U.S.A.” sources.
Outsourcing production to hostile nations of anything which comes into our homes and bodies on a daily basis could risk future mass attacks against us.
Wasn’t it “Mo-ray-iss”?
Another interesting (to me, at least) idea is that page (the messenger/servant) and page (sheet of paper) have completely different derivations. Page (sheet of paper) comes from the Latin pangere meaning “to fasten,” in the sense of sheets of paper fastened in a bound book in contrast to the single long roll of a scroll.
As a result, page and page are both homographs (written the same) and homonyms (pronounced the same), but they are entirely different words.
As I recall, it was MOR-is.
And “pages” of memory in computers, too.
I remember standing in the County Courthouse in Junction City near a prosperous drug dealer (whose car we had just forfeited.) When the doper’s pager went off, I offered to trade pagers with him. He graciously demurred. By the way, that Merkur was damn fast.
It was a very nice German Ford–(Mercury was almost solely a North American brand). It was supposed to be pronounced “mehr-koor”, but too many Mercury salesmen rhymed it with “worker”. It should have attracted more customers, but the corporate styling was too similar to the Mercury, sold in the same salesroom and much cheaper.
You decide:
Hospitals in America still issue pagers to their doctors and other workers because they are so cheap.
I wore one to a convivence store a few years ago, and the young cashier pointed at it and said in wonder, “Is that a pager?” like she had spotted some rare antique actually still in use. I would have gotten less of a response if I had ridden up in a horse carriage.
You have to admire the dilemma that Israel has presented to Hamas. If they use cellphones, they can be tracked by the signal they transmit. If they use pagers the pagers can be rigged to blow up because most pagers are fairly empty inside, plenty of room for some C4.
Steve Jobs famously would dip prototype iPhones in a glass of water. If the phone absorbed any of the water Jobs would send the phone back to the engineers demanding that the excess space in the iPhone be utilized. There is no space for anything extra in most smart phones.