Here I go---again--I should be canning my fresh picked green beans, and then the beetroot...no not together in the same jar.
I
love to read these short informational pieces that appear on the
interwebs from time to time....and the "Popular Mechanics" caught my
attention, as I had never seen them referenced before today.
Time
was way back in the 1960's I would be at the neighbors house, with my
best friend, sitting on their semi-enclosed front porch, talking about
buying new school clothes (and how much I hated school,which I really
did hate), how gloomy humid, rainy, cold and clammy day was, or about
the Beatles latest record, and reading comic books. One day her older
brother left a copy of Popular Mechanics on top of the comic
books.....I paged thru it and thought how cool, love to page thru it
till this day, still don't understand it very often.
Holy
shades of "Rat Patrol", Batman,where the answer to a question that I
have wondered about since my Dad told me stories about WWII. It's good
to find answers to questions.
Where ‘Roger That’ Really Comes From
Bettmann/Getty Images
The term “Roger that” is a widespread term for confirmation, either between truckers on their CB radios, kids playing back and forth with walkie-talkies, or even face to face. But it’s easy to adopt the phrase and understand what it means without ever really knowing where it came from. So here’s a (very) brief history for your edification.
“Roger” comes from the phonetic alphabet used by military and aviation personnel during WWII, when the use of two-way radios became a main form of communication and operators need crystal clear ways to spell things out with no room for misinterpretation. You may be familiar with the current NATO version of the phonetic alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, etc.), where the the word for “R” is Romeo, but before that standard was adopted in 1957, the words were a bit different, and the word for “R” was “Roger.”
But the use of “Roger” as a confirmation has roots that go back even further, according to a blog post by Jakub Marian. In the Morse code days, when sending long messages could be arduous, a useful shorthand was to respond with single, meaningful letters.
Responding to a message with the letter “R,” for example, simply let the sender know their message had been received. When two-way radio came along, the shorthand continued, but with the word “Roger” instead of “R” itself.
Even though Roger has since been replaced with Romeo (and was “Robert” before it was ever Roger), the widespread use of the two-ray radio during the WWII wildly popularized the saying we still use so casually today. Roger that?
