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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.
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Indeed.
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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.
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Another place where "paging" was common in the past were hospitals.
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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.
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