Contextualizebeta

telling bone

noun

Etymology

A Hobson-Jobson based on interpreting telephone as telling + bone; coined by British screenwriter Richard Carpenter for the TV series Catweazle.

Definitions

  1. The telephone.

    • “Oh great magician! Conjure more voices with thy telling bone.”
    • His eyes widened. The box contained the Divine Egg! The strange sorcerer who was muttering into the telling-bone had found lots of them.
    • Lately, Fergus has been even more insufferable: he's in love, a piece of intelligence I winkled out of the elder curmudgeon, his grandfather, the Laird of Gunning, on the telling bone last night.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for telling bone. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA