Short Stuff: Mayday!

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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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. 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. H