One of the introductions to the stories I was reading mentioned the celebration of the holiday May Day. Although I had heard of this and a Maypole before, I was unsure about what it actually meant, so I went to Wikipedia.
May Day: May Day is a traditional holiday celebrated in the Northern European hemisphere, which historically celebrates the Spring season. It was also chosen by socialists as the day to celebrate international workers. Now, in the modern age, May Day is celebrated less frequently, or at least without as much celebration, but still is a popular holiday in England and the British Isles. Learning about the holiday and its name made me wonder if there was any connection to the distress call "mayday," which was conveniently linked at the top of the article.
Mayday: The distress call "Mayday" is indeed entirely unrelated to the holiday that shares its name. It is rather a kind of amalgamation from the French phrase m'aider (which sounds like mayday) which means, in context, "help me." It is always given three times in a row, like we commonly hear in movies, so as to differentiate it from any other potential use of "mayday." Mayday is still the official call that pilots and captains should use in the modern day. The use of distress signals brought me to "SOS"
SOS:Although commonly thought to refer to "Save our souls" or "save our ship," SOS is simply used as a morse code prosign (or procedural sign) because it is exactly 9 characters long (three shorts followed by three longs followed by three shorts). Curiously enough, the characters VTB would also make the same pattern, but is not used in favor of SOS. SOS has also come to be used a visual distress signal (by spelling out the letters). Before 1905, when it was standardized internationally, the standard distress signal was simply a repeating series of three dots and three dashes, without regard to letters. This piqued my interest in morse code in general.
Morse Code: Morse code was initially developed by Samuel Morse and some colleagues as they developed and further improved upon the telegraph machine. It was a very unscientific and simple process, as they kind of made it up as they went. Originally, they had not even made codes for each letter, relying instead on numbers, but were able to eventually change and adapt it into a more recognizable system. Morse code was in popular use for almost all of the later 19th and 20th centuries, and only began to be phased out at the end of WWII. The advent of more advanced radio technology and its use in the 1950's began to mark the decline of Morse code, and the last official communication in morse code in the United States was sent in 1999.
May Day: May Day is a traditional holiday celebrated in the Northern European hemisphere, which historically celebrates the Spring season. It was also chosen by socialists as the day to celebrate international workers. Now, in the modern age, May Day is celebrated less frequently, or at least without as much celebration, but still is a popular holiday in England and the British Isles. Learning about the holiday and its name made me wonder if there was any connection to the distress call "mayday," which was conveniently linked at the top of the article.
Mayday: The distress call "Mayday" is indeed entirely unrelated to the holiday that shares its name. It is rather a kind of amalgamation from the French phrase m'aider (which sounds like mayday) which means, in context, "help me." It is always given three times in a row, like we commonly hear in movies, so as to differentiate it from any other potential use of "mayday." Mayday is still the official call that pilots and captains should use in the modern day. The use of distress signals brought me to "SOS"
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| Morse Code |
Morse Code: Morse code was initially developed by Samuel Morse and some colleagues as they developed and further improved upon the telegraph machine. It was a very unscientific and simple process, as they kind of made it up as they went. Originally, they had not even made codes for each letter, relying instead on numbers, but were able to eventually change and adapt it into a more recognizable system. Morse code was in popular use for almost all of the later 19th and 20th centuries, and only began to be phased out at the end of WWII. The advent of more advanced radio technology and its use in the 1950's began to mark the decline of Morse code, and the last official communication in morse code in the United States was sent in 1999.
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