Speaker For The Diodes - April 7th, 2010

05:24 am - QotD

"It's sobering to realize many great people --- George Washington, Catherine the Great, Ramses the Great, Ramses the Pretty Good Considering He's a Beta And Doesn't Like A Pyramid So Large, and Elizabeth I --- lived without ever hearing a ``beep''. It makes you wonder what was heard when someone touched their noses. They can't have gone ``Ow'', because who would touch Elizabeth I's nose hard enough for it to hurt? But they can't have jumped right away to ``stop that''. There's a necessary escalation first.

"Still, you didn't see beeps before about 1929, or later if you weren't in on the early waves of psychoactive pharmaceuticals. But it had historic inevitability. By the late 20s radio was trendy, and the movies had learned how to talk, after a decade and a half of nervous humming and occasionally recognizing bits of the song. Now that all these media said things, they needed to sometimes not say things.

[...]

"Beeps were very marketable, particularly to the automobile industry, which needed the right onomatopoeia for car horns. Automobile clubs had gotten repeal in twelve states the laws requiring drivers to keep a passenger who signals hazardous conditions by screaming (and in four states plus Ontario gotten the law softened to the passenger making sarcastic comments), but what sound for the horn hadn't been settled. [...]"

austin_dern, 2010-03-26</p>