phone bone

Macquarie Dictionary put together on its website a list of new words that might possibly be included in the dictionary, and invited people to comment.  Among the words for July was phone bone, a bony outgrowth at the base of the neck ‘caused by the posture associated with phone use’. 

This goes back to an academic article published in Scientific Reports, a reputable scientific journal, in 2018.  The article was written by two researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.  For their study they took a number of patients in a chiropractic facility (so people who already had back problems) and concluded that there was an increase in the number of people who had this protuberance.  Right at the end of the article they tossed off the idea that it was related to increased use of digital devices.  They had not examined the use of such devices in their study group so there was no way they could correlate the outgrowth with the use of a mobile phone.  It was just a bright idea that they thought needed investigation.

That bright idea was picked up by the BBC and then the Washington Post.  It linked to the notion that digital devices were bad and old-style books were good, so it got traction.  But, as I said, it was an idea that had no evidence behind it.

So what does the dictionary do in this case? There are numerous citations for phone bone online so that means it should go in.  But that of course serves to sustain the misapprehension.  Even if the definition goes along the lines of ‘a bone spur thought by some to be caused …’ it still seems to lend some weight to the idea.  Could the dictionary go so far as to say ‘erroneously thought to be caused …’ and debunk the whole thing? It doesn’t help that phone bone is quite an appealing coinage. I expect the population at large will continue to use it notwithstanding the fact that the researchers have refuted the idea.