![\"SOS](\"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/files\/2019\/05\/mayday.png\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This internationally recognized call for help has long been common parlance, but until today, when I checked the OED listing<\/a>, I had no idea of its origin.<\/p>\n A 1923 usage listed gives us all we need to know: “Owing to the difficulty of distinguishing the letter \u2018S\u2019 by telephone, the international distress signal \u2018S.O.S.\u2019\u00a0 will give place to the words \u2018May-day<\/span>\u2019, the phonetic equivalent of \u2018M’aidez\u2019, the French for \u2018Help me\u2019.”<\/p>\n Fascinating and perhaps our briefest post yet. Good luck with finals, students!<\/p>\n Have a word or metaphor worth pondering? This blog will continue all summer.\u00a0Please nominate a word or metaphor useful in academic writing by e-mailing me (jessid -at- richmond -dot- edu) or leaving a comment below.<\/p>\n See all of our Metaphors of the Month\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Image courtesy of Pixabay<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This internationally recognized call for help has long been common parlance, but until today, when I checked the OED listing, I had no idea of its origin. A 1923 usage listed gives us all we need to know: “Owing to the difficulty of distinguishing the letter \u2018S\u2019 by telephone, the international distress signal \u2018S.O.S.\u2019\u00a0 will … Continue reading Metaphor of the Month: Mayday!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[87405,87399,40197],"tags":[87401],"class_list":["post-814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-etymology","category-metaphor","category-vocabulary","tag-metaphor-of-the-month"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-d8","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}