Mayday Mayday

So urgent, they named it twice. Yes, folks, it’s today, a time of dire emergency for this once great planet of ours.

Though it’s rather odd that, for a life or death utterance, often transmitted electronically, the internationally (supposedly) recognised plea for immediate assistance should consist of a weird and unnecessary bilingual pun. Outside of the more tortured works of James Joyce or Georges Perec or a long forgotten song called “San Ferry Anne”, how many bilingual puns are there? Well, I suppose there’s Chocolatey Clare, but she’s more of a bilingual bun.

If your aircraft is plummeting earthwards or your transatlantic bathtub is filling up, surely you want to scream something simple (there used to be a programme called that on the Light Programme on a Sunday night), like HELP ! – rather than expecting some old duffer in a wind-blasted radio-enabled Nissen hut somewhere to untangle the cryptic clue that the First of May in English happens to be the phonetic equivalent of “m’aidez”, which is French for “get the **** here right now”. Other languages are of variable usefulness in this context. “Aiuto”, the Italian version, would be onomatopoeically spot on for the nosediving Max 8 scenario, while the German “Hilfe” might be misheard, resulting in a smirking but ultimately unhelpful attendance by Sid Bimmler and the boys in black. In Spanish, there is a useful word that is employed in response to pleas for urgent assistance, namely “mañana”, which apparently conveys a meaning rather similar to the French shoulder shrug, although without the accompanying fast-forwarding sense of “I’ll just have another ciggie first” deliberation as the cathedral smoulders. Quite a different timescale altogether; different nationalities have different timescales. In Switzerland, for instance, fires get put out before they’re even started, and plane crashes aren’t allowed to be late. Nor should we forget that in any case the French are far more likely to mutter “merde merde” than “mayday mayday”  as they stuff the remnants of their glowing Gauloise into the nearest historic hassock.

In desperate situations you’d think that the briefest signal possible would be the one that would be used. That would be the full stop (or period . as Americans are wont to call it, as in “so I’m like OMG I’m like I’m so dysmenorrheic”). Unfortunately, that small dot might just be a microparticle of gnatpoo landing on the screen or a crackle of static caused by distant nylon. Not reliable as evidence of danger, even when of titanic proportions. “Have you just hit a large iceberg in the North Atlantic?” “No, it’s a man in Birmingham taking off his pullover”.

However, some alternative alphabets do recognise the value of brevity in busy connotations. The Braille alphabet employs the single dot for the letter A, the third commonest letter in English, while Morse code uses it for E, the most frequently occurring letter (as it is also in French). Bearing in mind the problem of not being able to recognise reliably a single pulse as an expression of panic rather than a spike of random noise, Morse code famously uses dash dash dash dot dot dot dash dash dash as representing SOS, “Save Our Souls”, a quaint expression rarely encountered these days, when ordinary folk are more likely to have algorithms than souls. British Rail and Transport for London have evidently declined to use nine dashes, which would represent “the three esses”, the all purpose announcement that means “if there’s a terrorist outrage we don’t know WTF to do but it’s up to you and we’ve covered ourselves because we’ve said the magic words”. But then they don’t use Morse anyway, or any other slightly comprehensible form of communication, so why should they.

Then there’s the old and tedious story about why keyboards are QWERTY and why emergency phone numbers aren’t 000. It’s all to do with redundancy. Yawn, and there’s a hospital called the Mayday in Croydon which - if my experience of Croydon is anything to go by - I imagine to be very busy. Its phone number ends in three thousand, which probably tells you something.  But so far, due to budget cuts, they’ve only named it once. Which brings us to politics and the present day.

 
So finally, let’s not forget the true meaning of May Day, that one day in the year when we can thank our beloved leaderene for being so wise, decisive, and determined, a day when we can wish that she be granted good fortune and divine wisdom in the governance of our country. Because she’s going to need it.