Exile #3 did this a few days ago (it was before her birthday - because the 4 is her age. I don't know who helped her but he's 36. She actually needed very little help with the alphabet, but did need some help finding the letters in the bubbles in the bath.For some reason 'k' and 'w' were missing. Maybe so that I can share a bit of unexplained culture-shock. I asked someone why all the radio stations have four letter codes starting with W. The answer, which was not very satisfying, was, 'On the west coast they start with K. No-one knows why.'
Someone must know.
My in-car radio station is WFLY or just Fly 92.3, it's a great station. Not too many adverts, amusing presenters and a play-list you can really get to know - in general they seem to have about 8 songs on very heavy rotation and they change I would guess about one of these each week, so you know what you're going to get if you do a reasonable-length journey. The girls are constantly close to note-perfect on all of them. Not word perfect though - Exile #3 likes to substitute phrases she knows for the ones she doesn't and Exile #4 just makes words up for the bits she doesn't understand. Neither of them take kindly to being corrected.
As for P and Z, well she managed to approximate them, and they don't have anything to do with radio as far as I know.
http://nelson.oldradio.com/origins.html
ReplyDeleteThank you arriviste - it also reminded me of some other wisdom I thought I'd transferred to here, but apparently failed to get around to...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.oldradio.com/archives/general/kwtrivia.htm
ReplyDeleteThis is vaguely useful (assuming it's reliable), but it still doesn't explain why ...
Wikipedia knows everything "The United States was represented by the military at the 1927 conference, which is why it received (or, in some cases, retained) A (for Army) and N (for Navy). The W and K for civilian stations followed as the simple addition of a dash to the Morse code letters A and N. (However, in 1912, KDA–KZZ, all of N, and all of W were assigned to the United States, but all of A was assigned to Germany and its protectorates.)"
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_sign