> Reëducation
While this is completely unrelated to the subject matter, I admire the New Yorker's insistence on keeping the diaeresis alive.
While this is completely unrelated to the subject matter, I admire the New Yorker's insistence on keeping the diaeresis alive.
SOS is a case in point. SOS is just SOS. It is most definitely not S.O.S.
SOS is a Morse Code prosign. Like all prosigns, it doesn't stand for the individual letters. The letters are just a way of writing out the sound. SOS definitely doesn't stand for "Save Our Ships" - it was first introduced in Germany!
In Morse code, the letter S is "dit dit dit" and the letter O is "dah dah dah". When you send individual letters, you pause in between. So if you were sending the individual letters S O S, or a word that happened to be spelled "sos", you'd send "dit dit dit <pause> dah dah dah <pause> dit dit dit".
But that's not how you send SOS. You run it all together: "dit dit dit dah dah dah dit dit dit".
The same is true for other prosigns such as AR which means "end of message". The letter A is "dit dah" and the letter R is "dit dah dit". But you don't send AR as "dit dah <pause> dit dah dit". It's "dit dah dit dah dit".
If someone sent me the individual letters A and R with the pause in between, I wouldn't recognize it as an end of transmission. I'm listening for the entire sound of "dit dah dit dah dit". It's really more like a big long "letter" of its own.
Prosigns are customarily written with a bar above the letters to show that they are connected without a pause. Of course, that's not always possible, but they definitely are never written with dots between the letters.
Except in New York, where they love the periods no matter how wrong they are!
The idea that it's actually one large, composite letter makes a lot of sense (just like certain letter sequences in strings like \n or \0).