>>Well if the slave's on a mobile phone (as we say), then he's probably taking phone bids on himself. Oh I give up!
>
>For some reason they're called cell phones here... pretty much like a phone in the bathroom is called "bathroom phone", and the phone in the kitchen a "kitchen phone". This is the States, they even have phones in prison cells.

Because they're on a "cellular network" of radio masts.


>>As I said to you way back, Old English used to have forms like this, But somewhere along the line it must have been decided that they were fairly useless ("Hmmm, let me count now - 1-2-3-4-5 - I'll use the 'five' form of address" - and then when a sixth person pops up from behind the sofa you've got to slip into the "sixth sense"?)
>
>I wish I could get into those times and sense the changes happening to the language. It can't possibly be that "it was decided"... it must have been happening in a more of a tidal wave fashion. Makes one wonder where do those tides come from.

In our case the "Tidal Wave" was the Norman Conquest and the beginnings of the francophonic invasion and bastardisation of the language! :-)

By the way, we're forgetting the flexibility of English to create new words on the fly, often making a noun or noun phrase into a verb. I don't know if Serbian can do that. e.g to brown-bag (eat your lunch from a brown paper bag), to CC somebody, to rear-end a car, etc.