May Day, Mayday

“Trala, it’s May, the month of yes, you may.” I used to play this Lerner & Lowe song every May Day. It’s a good and long month until June comes, “Busting out all Over.” Usually, the weather is relatively good, and folks look forward to it, especially if it’s been a bad winter. Actually, the first song I remember is “Walking through the park one day, in the very, very month of May. I was taken by surprise by a pair of roguish eyes.” I don’t know if it was a lullaby, but always sung after HAPPY BIRTHDAY

Yes,  I have a special affinity for May. I am a May baby — a Taurian & very much one.

My parents should have said “MAY DAY! MAY DAY! to warn the world of what they had wrought. So, given this prompt, I looked it up (I wonder why I never did before). I think it’s interesting, so here’s a quick scoop, if you are interested or look it up.  “There’s more to the story,” as Paul Harvey used to say.

“Convention requires the word be repeated three times in a row during the initial emergency declaration (“Mayday, mayday, mayday”). The word was conceived as a distress call in the early 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford.” He was assigned to come up with a word that would mean distress. It had to be easily understood by all (air and ground personnel) in an emergency.  Most air traffic at the time was between England and France. He chose “mayday,” the phonetic equivalent of the French m’aider, a short form of come help me.

It was first used in 1923, and adopted by the International Radiotelegraph Convention in Washington D.C. in 1927. It replaced the Morse code SOS because when spoken the letter “S” is not clear.

I hope everyone has, as the the Camelot song says a lovely month, free of any MayDays.

Please leave your comments below. 

Read more by Ada Mark Strausberg