[CQ-Contest] Iddy-umpty

David Gilbert xdavid at cis-broadband.com
Sat Nov 25 13:01:17 EST 2017


 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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