November 24, 2021 • 14 mins
Say it three times and help may arrive. But where did "Mayday!" come from? Listen in to find out.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and this is short stuff, the shortest stuff of
all this stuff. Stuffer are you calling stuffer? I'm calling
you a stuffer buddy. Oh yeah, born born and bread
stuffer stuff it stuff at like pizza huts, stuff crust,
(00:24):
cheese cheese, stuffed crust. Had pizza hudding so long. Uh yeah,
I haven't in a little while either. I had to
order a garbage pizza the other night though, for the
first time and probably twenty something years. Whoa are you
calling Pizza Hutt a garbage pizza. It wasn't Pizza Hud.
It was another big brand of delivery pizza. But I uh,
you know, we usually get the good pizza in the neighborhood,
(00:44):
like the neighborhood Pizzaia's. That's also you know, some of
it's wood fired. It's nice. I don't know if I
call it fancy pizza, but good stuff. But every once
in a while, you want you know, well, I got
shut out. It was during the World Series and Halloween,
so that's like a huge tonight, and they ran out
of stuff to make pizza, literally, and so I was
(01:06):
forced to turn to the garbage pizza. You know what
it was delicious? Yes, of course it is. It's terrible.
It's terrible for you. There's nothing good about it. Delicious,
it was really great. It's been so long. I was like, man,
I forgot about the garbage pizzas so and you're still
like going to say which one, even though you're ultimately
saying it was delicious. Huh, that's fine. I'm just I
(01:28):
think that's remarkable. Um, chuck. When you picked up the phone,
because I'm assuming you did this old old school style
and used the landline, picked up the phone and called, uh,
the garbage pizza company that when they answered the phone,
you said may day, may Day, may Day, I need
a pizza. Stat No, I said pan pan pan pan. Oh.
(01:50):
There you go, And they said you want a pan
pizza and you'd say no, and please don't interrupt me
because I'm supposed to say it three times pam pan oh.
Very funny. This is about may Day. The word we
want to thank live mint dot com, wonder Opolis dot org,
Science ABC Today I found out and the Government of
Canada website was pretty handy. Sure. Um, so we're talking
(02:13):
about May Day and everybody knows that may Day is
a distress call, um, and everybody probably has a better
handle on what to do in a May Day distress
call then you'd think, because from doing this research, it
seems that just about every May Day distress call I've
seen in a movie or on TV was pretty accurate.
It turns out, Yeah, Um, what you do is you
(02:37):
say it three times, like you said, you have to
do it three times because there there are a couple
of reasons. They don't want to be confused. First of all,
they don't want to mistake it for another word. If
you just say it once, so just literally reiterating may day,
they won't say did they say pay day? Those are
(02:59):
not that great or not. Um, So that's one reason
you repeat it three times. Another reason or it could
be noisy and uh, you know, in a plane or
on a boat or something. And the other reason is
that they know that you are calling for the May
Day yourself, like you yourself are in trouble, and you
are not relaying a call about a May Day from
someone else, which is something we'll get too, called a
(03:22):
may Day relay. Um, oh, you're not talking about I
think like you were saying that you know you're not
talking about some may day call that happened three years
ago that was just so great, right yeah, so, um,
so you do want to say it three times? May
day made a mayde a And then right after that
you've got you've got their attention and you're on stage
(03:43):
and they want to hear what you have to say.
So you're gonna follow that up with, um, what aircraft
or ocean going craft you are? Um, if you have
some sort of call number or sign or whatever, you'd
want to include that there. Then you're gonna tell him
exactly what the problem is. Um, you're taking on water,
which is a problem whether you're an aircraft or an
(04:05):
ocean going c You don't want to take on water
in an airplane. No, you want to tell him where
you're located or the last place you're known location was,
and maybe what direction you've been traveling in. You want
to talk about the weather, but not chewing the fat
talking about the weather. You wanted to say specifically what
kind of weather you're having in case you've got problems? Right?
What else? What? Uh, let me see, well, basically how
(04:29):
many people are aboard? That might be a nice thing
to mention. Sure kind of help you want. Yeah, and
that that's sort of the big one is, um, you
know my plane is going down over this part of
the ocean, and please send a boat. Yeah, that would
probably Yeah, I would have been like, please send another plane,
but yeah, that wouldn't make any sense. You'd want to boat,
(04:51):
you would want to send Please send a giant trampoline.
Uh So I say we take our break now and
then leave it as a cliffhanger. As you where the
word mayday came from? To begin with nice one? All right,
we'll be right back as s k as. Okay, Chuck,
(05:26):
we're talking about the origin of the may day distress call.
Where did it come from? Well, it started in m
hm uh it was. It was an idea of this
guy named Frederick Mockford. He was a radio officer at
uh Kroyd Croydon Airport in London and they were they
were looking for a word. They said, hey, we need
a word, um that somebody can say that everyone knows
(05:50):
as a distress signal. And it's got to be really
easily understood. Everyone has got to be able to get
on board with this thing. And we don't want to
go to a marketing department. So we'll just go to those,
to the people who do this. And he said, and
you know, they've been using s os like Morse code,
but since they were using radio communications more and more,
because we need an actual word. And help isn't good
(06:11):
because people say the word help just in conversation. Help. Yeah,
so you don't want to like send off fossil alarms.
It's gotta be something really independent from other words like that.
And I think a lot of the air traffic at
the time was between that report and an airport in Paris.
So he proposed uh, a French word. Yeah, French phrase
(06:36):
actually vanez medeer. And he said, let's use the shortened
one of may dair maddair vanes made air means come
help me. Apparently it's also frequently translated as lenda hand
come like like lend me a hand, but the literal
translation has come help me, send boat and send a
giant trampoline. And so he said, how about may dair
(06:59):
And they said, oh, it's even better, how about this
may day. Let's use a word that doesn't even exist,
although it does exist, but one that no one would
ever use uh in normal conversation, and certainly not three
times in a row, like you wouldn't say, like, um,
that made a mayde a mayde a party was the
(07:19):
greatest mayde a mayde a mayde a party I've ever
been to. Yeah, like the mayde a celebration like in um,
uh what was the follow up to? Um? Yes, thank
you buddy. That's right. People liked it. People started using it.
They said, this is great. Uh. And three years later,
(07:41):
four years later, it was officially adopted by the International
Radio Telegraph Convention of Washington, and then I think it
took I think it was mainly for planes. And at
what I think I figured out is it was is
when it became a nautical term as well. Okay, got you,
because yeah, it says that it was official in forty eight,
(08:02):
but this Radio Telegraph Convention and adopted it in n
got on board a little bit later. That's weird because
there were way more boats than planes in n I
don't know, maybe they were Uh, didn't get on board
with the radio communications is quickly. That seems foolish, but okay, alright, so, um,
(08:24):
there's another way to send a distress call. And you
mentioned earlier the may Day relay, which is fun to say, Hey, Um.
The may day relay is if you know that another
vessel's in trouble but their communications equipment is knocked out,
you can relay a may day request on their behalf
and it follows pretty much the similar um similar format. Um,
(08:46):
it's just your calling on behalf of that other vessel. Right, Yeah,
and I guess there could be a may day relay
relay too. I guess you can go on and on
if if you're not able to get a message to people,
you and relay it through other planes and boats. But
the problem is, though, by the time it finally gets
(09:06):
to like air traffic control, it comes out as purple
Monkey dinosaur ah, the old telephone game. Yeah, so let's
say you make a made a call and you're just joking.
They wouldn't nobody would consider that a big whoop, Right,
it's a big whoop. In the US, you can get fined. Uh,
(09:28):
you can go to jail for six months, I'm sorry,
six years to jail. You can. I have a feeling
it's more like you pay a fine and suspended sentence.
But it's a hefty fine, can be up to a
quarter of a million bucks. And it's one of those
deals where if they call out the Coastguard, you gotta
you gotta pay them back the money that it costs
to run that operation. I saw some somebody in Florida
(09:51):
in two thousand nine was caught giving a hoax, made
a call and ended up having to pay the coastguard
back nine hundred and six thousand dollars for the for
the search that was mounted. Yeah, and well you should too.
If you knowingly purposefully call out the coastguard for kicks
and they spend nine and six grand, the coastguard should
(10:12):
be made whole of that nine grand out of your pocket. Jerk.
And he was like, why was it that much? And
he said, well, we built a really nice new boat
for your call, right, We used the gold plated boats
for that call. Right. We ordered we ordered some really
expensive dinner that night. Yeah, you know what, we gotta
take out from out back that night. Thanks, thanks for
(10:34):
that too, Chuck. By the way, I mentioned pan pan earlier.
It's kind of a joke apparently, and I've never heard
this before in my life, but apparently pan pan and
this is another thing that we nicked from the French.
It's from p A n n E, meaning breakdown or trouble. Um.
They apparently pan pan is to be used if it's
(10:56):
not life threatening, but you still need help, and you
also say it three times. Yes, that's a really important thing. Um.
You want to say these things three times. That's what
gets everybody's attention, right, that's right. So um that means
the Tom Petty song in French is pam pan. Go
(11:18):
ahead and give it to me. I love that, okay,
so um pam pan is where you're you're basically saying, like,
I've got a pretty like a noteworthy emergency here, but
it's probably not life threatening. Somebody on board our boat,
(11:39):
um has has fallen and broken their kneecap. They're probably
not gonna die, but they really want to get off
this boat. Can you come help us as soon as possible?
Kind of thing or Um, there's we we actually have
a breakdown, like our boat is broken down. We're not
in any kind of threat because the weather is fine
or whatever, but we do need some help. That's when
you would use pam pan. That's right. There's another one
(12:02):
too that I could barely find. I found I found
it referenced in one article on Wikipedia. Chuck um, and
that was it. But it's security, and I don't know
if you say it security or something like that, but
it's spelled s C C U R I T E.
Thinks from the French as well. This may have been
(12:23):
from the Government of Canada website, which would make sense,
but this one makes a lot of sense. You'd say security, security, security,
if that's how you say it, and then you just
immediately proceed and talk about something that's like there's a
giant rock that wasn't there before in the shipping lane,
be careful of that, or there's a shipping container that
(12:44):
fell overboard, like you're letting somebody know about a track,
like a hazard, bad weather, something like that. You're not
asking for help, You're just making sure that everybody who
needs to know knows about that. That's right. Uh. And
then this is neither here nor there in terms of distress,
but something you will. There's a movie trope that always
bugs me, so I threw it in there. If you
(13:04):
ever see someone in a movie say over and out,
it's a screenwriter who doesn't know anything about radio communication.
No one who knows what they're doing says over and
out because over means I'm done talking and I'm ready
for you to respond and out means that you're done
and you're leaving. So you would never say over and out.
(13:25):
You might say over or out you decide I'll wait here,
but never over and out. Man. That's um. I love that, though.
I wonder who's the first screenwriter to do that. I
don't know. I hope I want to find out. Do
you ever see the what was it? The Secret Life
of Sherlock Holmes? No? I did not like it, Chuck.
(13:49):
I didn't like it, and I thought I would. Okay,
well that's it. Chuck's done talking. I'm done talking now too,
and that means short stuff is out. Radio Stuff You
Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(14:11):
H
Hey, welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and this is short stuff, the shortest stuff of
all this stuff. Stuffer are you calling stuffer? I'm calling
you a stuffer buddy. Oh yeah, born born and bread
stuffer stuff it stuff at like pizza huts, stuff crust,
(00:24):
cheese cheese, stuffed crust. Had pizza hudding so long. Uh yeah,
I haven't in a little while either. I had to
order a garbage pizza the other night though, for the
first time and probably twenty something years. Whoa are you
calling Pizza Hutt a garbage pizza. It wasn't Pizza Hud.
It was another big brand of delivery pizza. But I uh,
you know, we usually get the good pizza in the neighborhood,
(00:44):
like the neighborhood Pizzaia's. That's also you know, some of
it's wood fired. It's nice. I don't know if I
call it fancy pizza, but good stuff. But every once
in a while, you want you know, well, I got
shut out. It was during the World Series and Halloween,
so that's like a huge tonight, and they ran out
of stuff to make pizza, literally, and so I was
(01:06):
forced to turn to the garbage pizza. You know what
it was delicious? Yes, of course it is. It's terrible.
It's terrible for you. There's nothing good about it. Delicious,
it was really great. It's been so long. I was like, man,
I forgot about the garbage pizzas so and you're still
like going to say which one, even though you're ultimately
saying it was delicious. Huh, that's fine. I'm just I
(01:28):
think that's remarkable. Um, chuck. When you picked up the phone,
because I'm assuming you did this old old school style
and used the landline, picked up the phone and called, uh,
the garbage pizza company that when they answered the phone,
you said may day, may Day, may Day, I need
a pizza. Stat No, I said pan pan pan pan. Oh.
(01:50):
There you go, And they said you want a pan
pizza and you'd say no, and please don't interrupt me
because I'm supposed to say it three times pam pan oh.
Very funny. This is about may Day. The word we
want to thank live mint dot com, wonder Opolis dot org,
Science ABC Today I found out and the Government of
Canada website was pretty handy. Sure. Um, so we're talking
(02:13):
about May Day and everybody knows that may Day is
a distress call, um, and everybody probably has a better
handle on what to do in a May Day distress
call then you'd think, because from doing this research, it
seems that just about every May Day distress call I've
seen in a movie or on TV was pretty accurate.
It turns out, Yeah, Um, what you do is you
(02:37):
say it three times, like you said, you have to
do it three times because there there are a couple
of reasons. They don't want to be confused. First of all,
they don't want to mistake it for another word. If
you just say it once, so just literally reiterating may day,
they won't say did they say pay day? Those are
(02:59):
not that great or not. Um, So that's one reason
you repeat it three times. Another reason or it could
be noisy and uh, you know, in a plane or
on a boat or something. And the other reason is
that they know that you are calling for the May
Day yourself, like you yourself are in trouble, and you
are not relaying a call about a May Day from
someone else, which is something we'll get too, called a
(03:22):
may Day relay. Um, oh, you're not talking about I
think like you were saying that you know you're not
talking about some may day call that happened three years
ago that was just so great, right yeah, so, um,
so you do want to say it three times? May
day made a mayde a And then right after that
you've got you've got their attention and you're on stage
(03:43):
and they want to hear what you have to say.
So you're gonna follow that up with, um, what aircraft
or ocean going craft you are? Um, if you have
some sort of call number or sign or whatever, you'd
want to include that there. Then you're gonna tell him
exactly what the problem is. Um, you're taking on water,
which is a problem whether you're an aircraft or an
(04:05):
ocean going c You don't want to take on water
in an airplane. No, you want to tell him where
you're located or the last place you're known location was,
and maybe what direction you've been traveling in. You want
to talk about the weather, but not chewing the fat
talking about the weather. You wanted to say specifically what
kind of weather you're having in case you've got problems? Right?
What else? What? Uh, let me see, well, basically how
(04:29):
many people are aboard? That might be a nice thing
to mention. Sure kind of help you want. Yeah, and
that that's sort of the big one is, um, you
know my plane is going down over this part of
the ocean, and please send a boat. Yeah, that would
probably Yeah, I would have been like, please send another plane,
but yeah, that wouldn't make any sense. You'd want to boat,
(04:51):
you would want to send Please send a giant trampoline.
Uh So I say we take our break now and
then leave it as a cliffhanger. As you where the
word mayday came from? To begin with nice one? All right,
we'll be right back as s k as. Okay, Chuck,
(05:26):
we're talking about the origin of the may day distress call.
Where did it come from? Well, it started in m
hm uh it was. It was an idea of this
guy named Frederick Mockford. He was a radio officer at
uh Kroyd Croydon Airport in London and they were they
were looking for a word. They said, hey, we need
a word, um that somebody can say that everyone knows
(05:50):
as a distress signal. And it's got to be really
easily understood. Everyone has got to be able to get
on board with this thing. And we don't want to
go to a marketing department. So we'll just go to those,
to the people who do this. And he said, and
you know, they've been using s os like Morse code,
but since they were using radio communications more and more,
because we need an actual word. And help isn't good
(06:11):
because people say the word help just in conversation. Help. Yeah,
so you don't want to like send off fossil alarms.
It's gotta be something really independent from other words like that.
And I think a lot of the air traffic at
the time was between that report and an airport in Paris.
So he proposed uh, a French word. Yeah, French phrase
(06:36):
actually vanez medeer. And he said, let's use the shortened
one of may dair maddair vanes made air means come
help me. Apparently it's also frequently translated as lenda hand
come like like lend me a hand, but the literal
translation has come help me, send boat and send a
giant trampoline. And so he said, how about may dair
(06:59):
And they said, oh, it's even better, how about this
may day. Let's use a word that doesn't even exist,
although it does exist, but one that no one would
ever use uh in normal conversation, and certainly not three
times in a row, like you wouldn't say, like, um,
that made a mayde a mayde a party was the
(07:19):
greatest mayde a mayde a mayde a party I've ever
been to. Yeah, like the mayde a celebration like in um,
uh what was the follow up to? Um? Yes, thank
you buddy. That's right. People liked it. People started using it.
They said, this is great. Uh. And three years later,
(07:41):
four years later, it was officially adopted by the International
Radio Telegraph Convention of Washington, and then I think it
took I think it was mainly for planes. And at
what I think I figured out is it was is
when it became a nautical term as well. Okay, got you,
because yeah, it says that it was official in forty eight,
(08:02):
but this Radio Telegraph Convention and adopted it in n
got on board a little bit later. That's weird because
there were way more boats than planes in n I
don't know, maybe they were Uh, didn't get on board
with the radio communications is quickly. That seems foolish, but okay, alright, so, um,
(08:24):
there's another way to send a distress call. And you
mentioned earlier the may Day relay, which is fun to say, Hey, Um.
The may day relay is if you know that another
vessel's in trouble but their communications equipment is knocked out,
you can relay a may day request on their behalf
and it follows pretty much the similar um similar format. Um,
(08:46):
it's just your calling on behalf of that other vessel. Right, Yeah,
and I guess there could be a may day relay
relay too. I guess you can go on and on
if if you're not able to get a message to people,
you and relay it through other planes and boats. But
the problem is, though, by the time it finally gets
(09:06):
to like air traffic control, it comes out as purple
Monkey dinosaur ah, the old telephone game. Yeah, so let's
say you make a made a call and you're just joking.
They wouldn't nobody would consider that a big whoop, Right,
it's a big whoop. In the US, you can get fined. Uh,
(09:28):
you can go to jail for six months, I'm sorry,
six years to jail. You can. I have a feeling
it's more like you pay a fine and suspended sentence.
But it's a hefty fine, can be up to a
quarter of a million bucks. And it's one of those
deals where if they call out the Coastguard, you gotta
you gotta pay them back the money that it costs
to run that operation. I saw some somebody in Florida
(09:51):
in two thousand nine was caught giving a hoax, made
a call and ended up having to pay the coastguard
back nine hundred and six thousand dollars for the for
the search that was mounted. Yeah, and well you should too.
If you knowingly purposefully call out the coastguard for kicks
and they spend nine and six grand, the coastguard should
(10:12):
be made whole of that nine grand out of your pocket. Jerk.
And he was like, why was it that much? And
he said, well, we built a really nice new boat
for your call, right, We used the gold plated boats
for that call. Right. We ordered we ordered some really
expensive dinner that night. Yeah, you know what, we gotta
take out from out back that night. Thanks, thanks for
(10:34):
that too, Chuck. By the way, I mentioned pan pan earlier.
It's kind of a joke apparently, and I've never heard
this before in my life, but apparently pan pan and
this is another thing that we nicked from the French.
It's from p A n n E, meaning breakdown or trouble. Um.
They apparently pan pan is to be used if it's
(10:56):
not life threatening, but you still need help, and you
also say it three times. Yes, that's a really important thing. Um.
You want to say these things three times. That's what
gets everybody's attention, right, that's right. So um that means
the Tom Petty song in French is pam pan. Go
(11:18):
ahead and give it to me. I love that, okay,
so um pam pan is where you're you're basically saying, like,
I've got a pretty like a noteworthy emergency here, but
it's probably not life threatening. Somebody on board our boat,
(11:39):
um has has fallen and broken their kneecap. They're probably
not gonna die, but they really want to get off
this boat. Can you come help us as soon as possible?
Kind of thing or Um, there's we we actually have
a breakdown, like our boat is broken down. We're not
in any kind of threat because the weather is fine
or whatever, but we do need some help. That's when
you would use pam pan. That's right. There's another one
(12:02):
too that I could barely find. I found I found
it referenced in one article on Wikipedia. Chuck um, and
that was it. But it's security, and I don't know
if you say it security or something like that, but
it's spelled s C C U R I T E.
Thinks from the French as well. This may have been
(12:23):
from the Government of Canada website, which would make sense,
but this one makes a lot of sense. You'd say security, security, security,
if that's how you say it, and then you just
immediately proceed and talk about something that's like there's a
giant rock that wasn't there before in the shipping lane,
be careful of that, or there's a shipping container that
(12:44):
fell overboard, like you're letting somebody know about a track,
like a hazard, bad weather, something like that. You're not
asking for help, You're just making sure that everybody who
needs to know knows about that. That's right. Uh. And
then this is neither here nor there in terms of distress,
but something you will. There's a movie trope that always
bugs me, so I threw it in there. If you
(13:04):
ever see someone in a movie say over and out,
it's a screenwriter who doesn't know anything about radio communication.
No one who knows what they're doing says over and
out because over means I'm done talking and I'm ready
for you to respond and out means that you're done
and you're leaving. So you would never say over and out.
(13:25):
You might say over or out you decide I'll wait here,
but never over and out. Man. That's um. I love that, though.
I wonder who's the first screenwriter to do that. I
don't know. I hope I want to find out. Do
you ever see the what was it? The Secret Life
of Sherlock Holmes? No? I did not like it, Chuck.
(13:49):
I didn't like it, and I thought I would. Okay,
well that's it. Chuck's done talking. I'm done talking now too,
and that means short stuff is out. Radio Stuff You
Should Know is a production of I Heart Radio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(14:11):
H
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