There are various times in history when vacuum cleaners, cell phones and browsing the web would have made ZERO sense to your non-technical family.

People will learn new words that define new things and then suddenly it will seem the most natural thing in the world to call it by that name.

Portable tape players were cool. Then suddenly Sony made one, and we now all (those of us old enough) remember fondly our first or favorite walkman, whether it was and actual Walkman or not.

Smart Phones were hot tech, but our non-technical families didn't really get the point until suddenly those "smart phones" were "iPhones".

Web searches were a mystical dark art, with all your Alta Vista voodoo, until there was a single box with an algorithm that did a pretty good job finding what you meant... and then many competitors later, someone called one of those boxes "Google" and now that's the verb we use.

Marketing, sales, adoption drive the names things come to be known by. Sure, in reality it's Augmented Reality, but if in 5 years everyone's talking about their sweet new Holographic ski goggles, it's still AR in the mainstream.

A rose by any other name

Hologram/holographic is already a word. It has a very specific meaning. It is not a new conjured word like Walkman or Iphone, which were just one implementation of a portable tape player or smart phone.

It also has a rather general meaning for the majority of non-experts.

We re-appropriate words all the time in English, and it's generally a fine thing to do, specialists' consternation notwithstanding.

My mp3 player is still an actual Walkman.

What are you talking about? The walkman was the first portable tape player commercially available.

Also what Google brought that Altavista didn't have was that it actually returned relevant results, not pages of spam where webmaster cranked as many keywords as they could (including "Pamela Anderson", always).

I was talking portable players, not cassette tapes specifically. There were various options for tape, and 8-track and the like before the Walkman, all of which were portable and played music but none in the way that made the Walkman take off, obviously.

Sometimes people learn new words, other times keeping old words (usually modified) works better. To take your example, in Turkish the word for vacuum cleaner literally translates as "electric broom", and cell phones are commonly called "cep" which actually translates as "pocket". Or consider the British who still use electric torches (that's a flashlight for all you non-Brits).

We Brits also call a cell phone a "mobile phone" which describes perfectly what it is.

In the US, a "mobile phone" is a cordless phone with a base.

As an American, I don't agree.

All the companies are branding as "mobile." I don't think they really even sell household corded phones anymore, we don't have to be specific about them.

If I wanted a corded phone, I think I'd have to use that specific modifier to get one.

Anyway, back to the point--say "mobile phone" to Americans and they know it's a cellular phone.

Seconded. "cellphone" and "mobile phone" are basically interchangeable to me. Though, honestly I'm more likely to just refer to it as a "phone" and use a qualifier to refer to the non-mobile variety (e.g. "house phone" or "land-line")

we just say "torch"

and just about everyone says "hoover" not vacuum cleaner

I bet it would take along time for most people asked "how does a vacuum cleaner work?" to use the word vacuum, apart from as a name for the object.

Nah, "hoover" is just your dialect. American here, grew up in CA, and I've never heard or said "hoover".

But yeah, I wouldn't say "vacuum" as a method of action unless you really drilled down. (Something about "pump" and "sucking", but I'd have to think for a bit to get to the actual physical "vacuum" aspect of it.)

You're right, I meant to type "in the UK" somewhere but it seems I forgot

In Indiana, a lot people said "sweeper" and they "sweeped" the room with it.

Can confirm, Hoosier here.

Also 'clicker' for remote.

True, but that word is pretty clearly gonna be Hologram. Augmented Reality isn't as fun to to as as Hologram or Kleenex.

Browsing the web - yes

But vacuum cleaners and and cell phones contain the name the explanation of what they are and do. "augmented reality" doesn't. Holographic... it does a better job, at least for some people.

How does "cell phone" explain anything useful about that particular type of phone? Using the word "cell" for a specific geographic area covered by a particular radio tower is itself a rather vague and general analogy. You could use "cell" for any element of a larger structure or organism I guess, but it wouldn't explain anything specific.

"Mobile phone" could have made sense to someone even before the introduction of mobile phones. But I think the word "cell phone" only took on meaning after the introduction of the device itself.

The cell(ular) in cellphone refers to the handoff between cell towers as you move around.

In comparison Radio tends to have a single tower that sends radio waves and does not care about who is listing. The advantage for cellphones is you can reuse the bandwidth from the same small set of frequencies across the country AND maintain a phonecall durring a handoff (where raido keeps forcing you to change stations on a long trip). The issue is the phone's need to rebroadcast their position constantly which eats’ battery life. It's even worse when they fail to connect to a tower as they just keep trying until the battery fails.

Granted, an end user might care, but MMX or SSE mean little to most Intel customers. 'with techron', 'dual turbo', 'LED TV's', 'tessellation', 'electrolytes'

I wasn't referring to "cell", I was referring to "phone". Just like with "vacuum" and "cleaner". You don't need to be an engineer to understand that the first one is used to make phone calls, and the second one to clean.

Augmented reality, on the other hand...