Postscripts by Barth John;

Author:Barth, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

MAYDAY!

On this year’s first day of May it occurred to me to wonder how “May Day,” which used to be an occasion for celebrating the end of winter and arrival of spring, came to be a nautical and aeronautical distress-call. I therefore duly Googled it, and learned from Wikipedia that in 1923 a British radio-operator overheard a French ship-captain in distress calling “M’aidez! M’aidez! M’aidez!”—which to his English ears sounded like “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!” and worked its way into our vocabulary, largely supplanting the old Morse-code “SOS” (dot-dot-dot dash-dash-dash dot-dot-dot: “Save Our Ship!”) as radio transmission and then the internet replaced telegraphy in the twentieth century.

Check out on Wikipedia the code’s inventor, Samuel Finley Breese Morse—a talented painter as well as an inventor—and be reminded of the first telegraph-message ever sent, from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844 (another May-day!): What hath God wrought?

Nobody sends telegrams these days, but as a kid during World War II I well remember how parents with a son in the military overseas feared the arrival at their door of a Western Union messenger with the War Department telegram beginning We regret to inform you …

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