The things you learn when you’re learning another language…
The international voice distress call is “mayday,” used to call for help in both in the air and on the water. The word is a phonetic transliteration of the French m’aidez or, in its infinitive form, m’aider, literally “help me!”
The term was coined by the radio officer at Croydon Airport in London, F.S. Mockford, in the early 1920s. Since most air travel was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris at that time, Mockford figured that a word that was easy to remember but had an underlying meaning in at least one of the two languages would be ideal, and “mayday” was born.
I learned the origin of the second word this morning reading a translation of a golf article in Le Journal de Montréal. My iPad translated “caddie” as “cadet,” which it turns out is the French source word for caddie. A cadet is more commonly a trainee military rank, but the Scots borrowed the word in the late 1600s to mean someone who did odd jobs, and eventually it was applied to the person who carried a golfer’s clubs. Incidentally, the derogatory term “cad” also is derived from this Scottish borrowing of “cadet.”
UPDATE: Tigers will not go 162-0. Could go 161-1, trend is now 108-54, though.
The Tigers lost today to the Indians, but ended up winning two of the three games in their opening series. But there goes the perfect season. Rule 5 draftee Akil Baddoo hit a home run in his first major league at bat today, a remarkable thing in itself, but he also did it on the first major league pitch he had ever seen in a regular season game. His parents, who were at the game, we’re very excited. And so was I.