Broadcasting terms

We still use "crooner" and 9 other expressions the radio gave us

Once, families gathered around the radio, not a television set. Broadcasting the news, music, and comedy, radio shows changed how people spent their evenings, but also how they talked. Terms like "crooner," "jingle," "payola," or even whole concepts like "the $64,000 question" all originated in radio stations. Here are 10 stories of words born during the last 100 years.

Long before anyone owned a radio, farmers were already broadcasting. The word meant "sowing seed by hand." It referred to walking across a plowed field and flinging grain in wide arcs so that it landed everywhere at once. The term first appears in print in 1767, and it’s a good metaphor for what the radio technology ended up doing.

The first documented use of the word to refer to the technology occurred in 1921; the following year, the BBC was born, incorporating it in its name, British Broadcasting Company.

Why would a melodrama about love, betrayal, and amnesia be named after laundry soap? It has to do with the sponsors. In the early 1930s, radio filled its daytime hours with 15-minute serial dramas aimed at women doing housework, and companies like Procter & Gamble, Colgate-Palmolive, and Lever Brothers paid for them and often produced them.

The "opera" part was a joke borrowed from "horse opera," slang for cheap Westerns. The genre is generally traced to Painted Dreams, which premiered on Chicago’s WGN in 1930. Its creator, Irna Phillips, pioneered the cliffhanger ending and the mood-setting organ music. She went on to create other shows like The Guiding Light (1937), which, along with the term, moved on to television.

Long before we came up with the term "DJ," a disc jockey was the person who picked and played records on the air. It’s important to understand that, in radio’s early years, recordings were considered second-rate; in 1929, NBC proudly declared live broadcasts superior to anything recorded.

Then, in the 1930s, while sharing live news and waiting for relevant updates, announcers decided to play music to fill the long gaps between bulletins. In 1935, announcer Martin Block did just that, and columnist Walter Winchell allegedly joked that he was a "disc jockey": the disc was the record, the jockey the man riding it. Within a decade, every station needed someone playing the discs.

Most people remember The $64,000 Question as the 1950s TV quiz show sponsored by Revlon. But the phrase was born on radio. In April 1940, CBS launched Take It or Leave It, a show where contestants faced seven questions: the first was worth $1, and the prize doubled each time, so the last one was worth $64.

After every answer, they could pocket the money or risk it, while the studio audience shouted, "You’ll be sorry!" Garry Moore, Eddie Cantor, and Jack Paar all took turns as host. "That’s the $64 question" quickly became slang for any tough problem. Inflation eventually caught up with a more substantial prize, and it ended up as the name of the TV show.

In the early 1920s, finding a station took patience and both hands. Many sets had two or three large dials, and every one had to be turned in unison to bring in a signal. No wonder announcers urged audiences to "stay tuned": if they lost the station, the fiddling had to start all over again. Single-knob tuning only became common late in the decade. "Sign off" was already around, meaning simply to stop doing something, but by 1923 radio had made it the station’s nightly goodbye.

The term "jingle" itself dates to the 1300s, referring to the tinkle of small bells. Over time, the word evolved to describe short, catchy verses with repetitive rhythms and rhyming lines, like children's nursery rhymes. When catchy musical slogans hit the airwaves in the 1920s, advertisers borrowed the word.

The first jingle ever was played on Christmas Eve, 1926. In Minneapolis, four men stepped up to a microphone: a court bailiff, a grain company worker, a printer, and an undertaker. They sang a soon-to-be-famous little song that asked, "Have you tried Wheaties?" The station that played it was Washburn Crosby Company (WCCO), later General Mills. The jingle measurably increased sales in Twin Cities, where it was airing, so the company bought national airtime and hired quartets across the country to sing it. It wasn’t long before the advertising world caught on to the strategy.

Payola is a secret payment to get a song on the air. Variety coined the term in 1938, attaching "pay" to the jaunty ending of brand names like Victrola and Pianola. When television had taken over radio’s dramas and stations had hours to fill with music, cheap singles were flooding the market. A handful of superstar disc jockeys suddenly held the power to turn an obscure track into a hit overnight.

Record labels began bribing DJs with cash, co-writing credits, and luxury gifts to guarantee airplay. Ethically, critics viewed payola as a form of consumer fraud. In November 1959, Alan Freed, the most popular DJ in the country and the man credited with popularizing "rock ’n’ roll," was fired from WABC after refusing to sign a statement that he’d never taken payola. In 1960, the US Congress made it a federal crime to accept undisclosed payola.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke to the nation by radio, he sat at a White House desk crowded with microphones, but found a direct way into people’s living rooms. His first talk came on March 12, 1933, eight days after his inauguration and in the middle of a banking panic. He opened with "My friends" and explained, in plain language, how the banking system worked.

Before his next address, that May, CBS’s Harry Butcher called it a "fireside chat" in a press release, and the cozy name stuck. Roosevelt gave about 30 of them through 1944, speaking very slowly. Families gathered around to listen: by 1940, more than 80% of American homes owned a radio.

We might associate the term with velvety voices and dark suits, but "crooner" began as an insult. The old Scottish verb "croon" once meant to lament, or even to bellow like a bull. By the late 1920s, it described a soft, intimate style of singing.

This style was only made possible by the invention of the electric microphone. Before it, singers had to project their voices to the back of the theater. Rudy Vallée first crooned through a megaphone around 1930, and he is believed to have become the first major star to sing into a microphone in a ballroom. In January 1932, Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell called crooning "a degenerate form of singing," and The New York Times predicted it would vanish soon. Time proved them wrong.

Today, calling something "amateur hour" is an insult: it mocks sloppy, unprofessional work. In the 1930s, it was the most exciting hour on the radio. Major Edward Bowes launched his talent show on New York’s WHN in 1934, in the depths of the Depression, and took it national on NBC the next year. Each episode began with Bowes spinning a "wheel of fortune" and intoning, "Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows." But the show’s production team pre-screened thousands of applicants and carefully lined up the performers.

On September 8, 1935, a 19-year-old from New Jersey sang tenor in a quartet called the Hoboken Four. His name was Frank Sinatra, then still an amateur.

A what?

What is the name for the tip of your shoelaces?

While we typically go about life describing the end of our shoelaces as ‘the end of the shoelace’ or the whites of the egg as ‘egg whites’, these things, and many more, have names of their own, even if they are not always widely known or used. Let’s have a look at 11 common things that have proper names, even if no one uses them.

The little plastic or metal tip at the end of shoelaces or drawstrings is there to prevent the fibres from fraying, and to make it easier to pass the lace or drawstring through a hole. Its proper name is ‘aglet’, from the French aguillette, meaning ‘needle’, a reference to its use in helping to thread the string through the hole.

Erasers at the end of wooden pencils are not usually glued together, but they are instead held together by a little metal band. This band is called a ‘ferrule’—from Medieval Latin viriola or ‘little bracelet’—and the term can be used for any metal band that strengthens or fastens a joint, such as those used in handles, to hold brush bristles, or to secure a connection between two cables.

The ‘little plastic table on the pizza’ is quite a long name for something aptly named ‘pizza saver’, but no one seems to really care. It was invented in 1974 by an Argentine pizza maker, who named it SEPI or separador de pizza (‘pizza separator’). In America, it was patented as a ‘package saver’ in 1985, though it was later renamed ‘pizza saver’.

Most mathematical symbols have proper names that are not regularly used, and the division sign is no exception. It was officially introduced into mathematics as a symbol of division in 1659 by the Swiss mathematician Johann Rahn in his influential work Teutsche Algebra. This sign is called an ‘obelus’, from the Greek obelos, meaning ‘sharpened stick’ or ‘skewer’, as it was initially used as a pointer for questionable passages in a text.

Paper cups and their corresponding cardboard sleeves to protect our hands from the heat or the cold are relatively new, but their proper names are not—at least, the name for the cardboard sleeve. This holder is called a ‘zarf’, an Arabic (zuruuf) and Turkish (zarflar) word used for ornamented cup holders, usually made from metal. The materials and the details of the zarf have changed, but the purpose still remains.

Do we need a more technical term than ‘armhole’ for a hole meant for an arm to go through? Maybe not, but the technical term still exists. An ‘armscye’ (pronounced arm-sigh) is the proper term used in sewing and patterns to describe the opening on a garment where the sleeve is attached. The word is a compound of ‘arm’ + scye, a Scots word meaning ‘opening’. So, in the end, ‘armscye’ just means ‘armhole’.

We often use the words ‘railing’ or ‘handrail’ when talking about a staircase, but these terms only describe the top portion of it, not the pillars that support the handrail. The pillars and the rail altogether are called a ‘banister’, a corruption of the word baluster, derived from the Italian balaustro. The term originally was used for the pillars, but eventually came to mean the entire structure.

Not all beverage foams are equal. The foam on top of alcoholic beverages, in particular, is called ‘barm’, a term derived from Old English beorma, meaning ‘yeast’ or ‘leaven’, and it's mainly used for the effervescence of fermented liquors such as beer, ale, or wine.

Did you know that the white (or clear) part of the egg is called the ‘albumen’? The term entered English as a loan from Latin, where _albumen_—from albus, ‘white’—was used in the same way. Though it is not widely used in everyday life, it’s still the correct term for that part of the egg.

As a rule of thumb, you should always assume that all marks, symbols, and strokes in calligraphy have a proper name, even if it's not often used. When it comes to the lowercase letters ‘j’ and ‘i ’, the little dot on top is not a dot, but a ‘tittle’. This name comes from the Latin _titulus_—meaning ‘title’, ‘inscription’, or ‘small mark’—and was initially used by scribes to distinguish these letters in their cramped writing.

If you ever got lost in the mall or the museum, you must have come across a map that marked your location using an arrow or a pointer, usually accompanied by the phrase ‘you are here’. Well, that pointer is called an ‘ideolocator’, a combination of the Greek idea, a ‘mental image, concept, or visual representation’ (in this case, the pointer), and the Latin locatus, meaning ‘to place’ (the specific location on the map). For the sake of convenience, we will keep calling it the ‘you are here’ sign.