I have for some time had a crackpot theory that language will actually evolve the other way.<p>We have these things we carry around with us, called &quot;phones&quot;; they are actually general-purpose computing devices and making (what we still call) phone calls is a small part of their purpose. And to an increasing extent these can fulfill almost all our computing needs.<p>So, fast-forward a couple of decades, assuming no huge technological shifts[1]. Everyone is used to having one of these things that they carry around in their pocket, and scarcely anyone really needs any other general-purpose computing device. We still call them &quot;phones&quot; because we always did -- so now this is the usual term for a general-purpose computing device. And, yeah, there are some people who, because of their unusual needs, have a bigger more powerful one. Well, what are you going to call something like a phone but sized to sit on your desk while you work? Obviously it&#x27;s a desktop phone, right? And somewhere out there In The Cloud there are whole farms of server phones :-).<p>And there will be conversations like the ones we[2] now have about how &quot;computer&quot; used to mean a human being who did calculations. &quot;Hey, did you ever look up where the word &#x27;phone&#x27; actually comes from? It turns out that back in the 20th century they mostly used them for talking to one another, and it comes from some Greek thing meaning &#x27;sound at a distance&#x27;. Weird, huh?&quot;<p>[1] That&#x27;s a pretty big assumption, of course.<p>[2] For sufficiently small values of &quot;we&quot;.