From an article on BBC.com about words about to be lost:
"Iddy-umpty"
"An affectionate term for Morse code, used in the early 1900s. ‘Umpty’
had been in use since the mid 19th Century as a slang term for an
unspecified or seemingly impossibly large number (which eventually gave
us the word umpteen in the early 1900s). To that was attached the
apparently random prefix ‘iddy’ to form ‘iddy-umpty’, a word intended
perhaps to imitate the stuttering sound of a Morse code transmission,
and to allude to its seemingly countless stream of ‘dits’ and ‘dahs’."
I had never even heard that term before, and I've been licensed since 1967.
73,
Dave, AB7E
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