Cell phone

It's late in the afternoon. On my way home, I was reading a book about wordplay on a minibus. But I couldn't concentrate.

I wasn't tired. And yet it took me quite some time to finish a page. I felt an explosion inside my head, as if my brain lost the way underneath a mushroom cloud from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Ahhhh, there was too much noise around. That, it hardly needs saying, was the noise of passenger's use of cell phone.

Now that smoking is banned on most public areas, verbal pollution by cell phones has dominated the public nuisance. This new brand of pollution, as Faith Popcorn and Adam Hanft remind us, is secondhand speech, the verbal equivalent of secondhand smoke - "not as dangerous but more annoying, and definitely hazardous to your peace of mind."

Alas, do we have a word to describe those people who talk loudly on the cell phones and broadcast their one-sided conversations?

Cellfish.