This week: It’s part two of the Guess a Language Challenge! And then, we’re doing some stretches with the radio. Let’s get to it!
Challenge!
As I mentioned last week, my friend Mathias and I decided to challenge each other to identify a language from this list. The first bit of the challenge, where Mathias guessed a language I chose, ran last week in The Average Polyglot. (You don’t need to watch Part 1 before watching Part 2, but it might make things a bit clearer.)
And so, without further ado: Part 2!
We had a lot of fun with this challenge. It’s always great to talk with Mathias and I encourage all of you to go sign up for his publication just as soon as you’re done here.
And now, on with your regularly scheduled Learned!
Radio Radio
It's undokai season here in my corner of Japan. All the elementary school kids have been practicing for "sports day" for weeks, getting their dance steps down and running the relay course to make sure they know what to do on the big day. And the big day itself always starts the same way: rajio taisou.
Now, you might be familiar with "radio calisthenics." It's often trotted out as part of the "Japan is so quirky1" package, or, as it was taught to me in the 80s, "Why Japanese companies are making more money than ours." So you might have seen photos or videos of groups of workers, some in office gear, others in various kinds of uniforms, all gathered in a parking lot while a loudspeaker chants out different exercises that everyone then does together.
It's not as common as it once was, but it is still performed in companies all over Japan. More importantly, it has become something of a cultural touchstone, as evidenced by its use in schools and clubs all over the country. As usual, Wikipedia has a pretty good definition:
Radio calisthenics (ラジオ体操, rajio taisō, literally, "radio exercises") are warm-up calisthenics performed to music and guidance from radio broadcasts. Originating from the United States, they are popular in Japan and parts of China, North Korea and Taiwan.
The whole article is well worth reading, and it gives a neat history of the practice, but the relevant passage for us is the final one:
Radio taisō is still used at schools as a warm up for physical education classes and during sports day activities. It is also implemented by some companies as a way of building morale and a sense of group unity, as well as to raise energy levels and encourage good health.
Cool. The kids enjoy it and, honestly, it's something I've come to appreciate as I've gotten older. Maybe not so much for the morale and group unity, but, you know, I'm edging towards 50 and starting the day with a bit of light stretching and gentle exercise is sliding steadily past "good idea" and over to "medically necessary." There's just one small problem, and it's best illustrated by this exchange between me and my daughter:
"By the way," I asked, "what's a radio?"
"Uhm, it's like the orange thing you have...you play music on your phone and it goes beep beep beep to it. That's radio."
By "orange thing" she was referring to the bluetooth speaker I use around the house. Not exactly a radio. At least not in the classic AM/FM set. Which makes sense. She's seven. She's never tuned a radio to a station in her life. More than that, I don't think she's aware of what radio is. After all, my wife and I both use bluetooth in our cars, and, while I have a stereo2 in my home office, I usually use it for...wait for it...playing music via bluetooth from my phone. So, yeah, the kids have no idea what radio is3.
A few weeks ago, we talked about the word phone and how remarkable persistent it has been even as the technology that defines it has outpaced its literal meaning. I think radio might be on a similar course.
Radio has a moderately complicated etymological history. From The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins4:
Radio is an Americanism that came into the language in about 1910, as a shortening of radiotelegraph. The radio in radiotelegraph derives from the Latin radius, beam, ray.
Word Origins: The Secret Histories of English Words from A to Z5 expands on this a bit, adding:
This originally meant ‘staff, stake’, but it is its secondary meanings that have contributed significantly to English: ‘spoke of a wheel’, for instance, lies behind English radius, and the notion of a ‘ray’ has produced radiant, radiate, radium...
But none of this gets at what I mean when I say I'm listening to the radio. No, what I mean is based entirely in my generational and cultural experience of tuning my AM/FM, double-cassette, stereo system to a specific station and waiting for the DJ to play my favorite song6. Which is the same use my parents would have had in the 70s, and their parents would have had in the 50s, and their parents would have had back in the 30s. That's the use I wonder about7.
Will the kids of the next few generations listen to the radio? Yes. Of course they will. It might be through Spotify or Apple Music, but it'll still be radio8.
But that's my point. Much like phone is becoming less a thing to talk through and more a handheld computer with phone capabilities, radio is becoming less about listening to music broadcast from a radio station and more about the act of listening to a randomized stream of music, regardless of the technology involved. Now I just need to find a rajio taisou playlist...
Down the Rabbit Hole
Have I ever mentioned how much I love spaceships? And how very tempted I am to buy a 3D printer? I mean, just imagine the possibilities…
You could have Serenity, the Millennium Falcon, the Battlestar Galactica (new) and the Battlestar Galactica (classic). You could have ships from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, like Zarkov’s Rocket Ship from Flash Gordon, or maybe something brand new, like this ship from No Man’s Sky.
Ah. But you don’t want to buy. You want to print. No problem. Here are the plans for Futurama’s Planet Express, Star Trek’s classic Enterprise, and the entire city of Atlantis from Stargate: Atlantis!
Honestly, it’s getting harder to resist…
From the Archives
Something a little different this week - a couple of years ago, I ran a series of shorter, email only issues under the subtitle “The Glossary.” A few of these issues were published on the site as promotional pieces, and this week I’d like to direct you back to one of them as it discussed music, adverbs, and one of my favorite books. Here then, from December 2020 is The Glossary, Issue 19: Occasional Music.
AKA, every article written about Japan between 1997 and yesterday.
When was the last time you sat and listened to the radio? At a guess, I'd say it was in your car during that interminable hour-and-a-half when you couldn't get your phone to connect to the bluetooth in your car.
The thing is, she's not wrong. Bluetooth is a form of ultra high frequency radio waves. So, technically, every time you use bluetooth to listen to music, you're using radio. Just not, the radio.
Fourth Edition by Robert Hendrickson, Facts On File, Inc., 2008.
Second Edition by John Ayto, A&C Black Publishers, Ltd., 2005.
Preferably without babbling all over the first 15 seconds so I could get a good recording to go on the mixtape I was making for that girl I liked, you know?
The word itself is never going anywhere. English never loses anything, it just sort of misplaces it for a century or two.
Both services use "radio" to signify a personal playlist built by the service's algorithms. It is very much like listening to the radio, only without the DJs and without the endless ads.