January 2012

Drongo was not a flyer

23 Jan, 2012  No Comment

drongoIt is Australia Day this week so I have chosen a most Australian word as the word of the week. If you get called a drongo it is likely you have done something rather unintelligent in front of your mates. Drongo is a uniquely Australian, mild form of insult, defining a person’s wit as being at a level only slightly cleverer than idiot.

The word drongo originates as a word for a type of bird. The Spangled Drongo (Dicrurus bracteatus) is the only species of the drongo family found in Australia. The name originally comes from Malagasy, the indigenous language of Madagascar (where there are quite a few drongo species).

It is commonly suggested that the slang use of drongo came about as a reference to the bird’s apparently manic and almost comical behaviour as it swoops and dives in flight chasing insects. The strange behaviour was then metaphorically applied to people who were behaving idiotically. Another suggestion is that it refers to the idea that some species of the bird migrate to colder regions in winter, which is contrary to commonsense. However, the birds’ behaviour or migratory habits are not things that most Australians would be familiar with and are considered incorrect derivations.

The true derivation is from the Australian racehorse named Drongo of the early 1920s (which had taken its name from the bird). Now, while every Australian reveres Phar Lap—the thoroughbred that became a national hero a few years later (during the Great Depression)—Drongo is little remembered except that his name has passed into Australian folklore.

Drongo was not a particularly bad horse, he ran several seconds and a third in major races and even came fifth in the 1924 Sydney Cup. Although he came very close to winning major races, in 37 starts he never won a race (Phar Lap on the other hand won 37 races from 51 starts including the Melbourne Cup in 1930).

Soon after Drongo retired, racegoers started to use his name to describe other horses that were having unlucky careers or that had failed to live up to expectations. The word drongo soon took on a more negative meaning and was applied to people who were hopeless cases, no-hopers or fools.

In the Royal Australian Air Force during the 1940s new recruits were known as drongos, which, in a nice little bit of word-use, recombined the bird meaning with the idiot meaning.

So if you get called a drongo this Australia Day remember poor old Drongo, who was neither a bird nor a flyer.

Signalling distress

16 Jan, 2012  No Comment

titanic_morse4This year is the centenary of one of the most famous distress calls of history. On 14 April 1912, during a moonless night in the middle of the Atlantic the Titanic hit an iceberg. Soon afterwards Captain Smith ordered the First Radio Officer, Jack Phillips, to radio for help.

These were the pioneering days of wireless communication. Wireless telegraphy had only just started to be used on ships through the work of Guglielmo Marconi (who was waiting in New York to join the Titanic on the return journey). Telegraphers used morse code to send messages by tapping out letters using a series of dots (short signals) and dashes (long signals).

CQD

When Phillips first sent the Titanic’s distress signal he tapped out: CQD CQD CQD CQD CQD CQD. British wireless operators used CQ as a general broadcast to all stations, and since 1904, CQD as a distress signal. The letters meant calling all stations (CQ) we are in distress (D) and did not represent a message such as Come quick danger.

SOS

After little response to the CQD message, Harold Bride, the Second Radio Officer suggested they also use SOS SOS SOS. SOS had been adopted in 1908 as the international distress signal (after much debate) because the three dots, three dashes and three dots were unmistakable and could not be misinterpreted. There is a popular but incorrect belief that SOS means Save Our Ship, Save Our Souls, or Send Out Succour.

The distress signals of the Titanic were recognised but the ships that responded were not close enough to get there before she sank.

Mayday

More than a decade later, with the development of voice transmission, a new international distress message was required. The Mayday callsign originated in 1923 when Frederick Mockford, a senior radio officer at Croydon Airport in London, was asked to think of a distress call easily understood by pilots and ground operators. Because most of the airport traffic at that time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the word Mayday from the French m’aider, a shortening of venez m’aider meaning come help me.

Pan-pan

The distress signal pan-pan is used for an urgent situation of a lower order than a Mayday (or SOS) such as a mechanical breakdown or a medical problem. It comes from the French, panne, meaning a breakdown. Similarly to other distress signals there are constructed meanings for the word: Possible Assistance Needed or Pay Attention Now.

These distress signals, CQD, SOS, Mayday and pan-pan, have all been derived from words or codes. The constructions of phrases around them are examples of “backronyms”, reverse or backward acronyms, phrases constructed around words rather than acronyms that are words constructed from phrases.

This year we will remember the lost souls of those passengers who, despite the signals of their radio operators, were not rescued from the waters of freezing Atlantic a century ago.