countdown was: "As If"

[carole crompton]

So when did people start doing a count down from 10 to Happy New Year
on New Year's Eve?
I think I remember it as part of the Guy Lombardo Times Square thing.
Before or during the ball dropping?
CMC



On Tuesday, June 21, 2005, at 12:00 PM, Laurence Horn wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: countdown  was: "As If"
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
>> I've heard, but have no documentation for, that the idea of a
>> "countdown" for a missile/rocket launch was an invention of the
>> Germans
>> at Peenemuende (where the V-2 rocket was developed), and when they
>> came
>> to America after the war, to support V-2 launches at Ft. Bliss
>> (1946-1950), and then here to Huntsville for the development of Army
>> and
>> NASA rockets, they brought countdowns with them.  So the term could
>> show
>> up in US technical documents as early as 1946 or so.
>>
>> Contemporary accounts of the Manhattan Project show that a countdown
>> was
>> used at the Trinity test, but I can't find the word "countdown" in any
>> contemporary accounts online.
>>
>> Robert Heinlein's 1952 novel "The Rolling Stones" calls it a "count
>> off":
>>
>>      "She answered, "Board green!  Clear from tower! Ready for count
>> off!"
>>      "Minus thirty! Twenty-nine -- twenty-eight --" He broke off and
>> added sheepishly, "It does feel good." "
>> [from Amazon.com's Inside the Book]
>>
>>
>> OED has 1953
>>
>
> Right, that's the one I was noting below, along with the lack of any
> entry or documentation for the pop music "countdown".  Does anyone
> have a date for that?  As I mentioned, I remember the music
> countdowns themselves from the mid-1950s (top 40 of the week, top 400
> of the year, even one for the decade--probably on 12/12/59), but I
> can't remember when the word itself was introduced.  In any case, it
> does seem culturally salient enough by now to have earned a place in
> dictionaries, and AHD4 doesn't include it either, just the missile
> sense.  Note that the standard sense provided for the latter--AHD's
> is 'The counting backward aloud from an arbitrary starting number to
> indicate the time remaining before an event or operation, such as the
> launching of a missile or space vehicle'--doesn't really apply
> directly to the former, in which the counting down *is* the event.
> You can watch the AFI show tonight if you don't believe me.
>
> Larry
>
>>
>>
>>>  *In writing this, I began wondering when _countdown_ began--I
>>>  remember it from pop/rock music radio shows, of the top n
>>>  hits of the week or (on New Year's Eve) of the year, well
>>>  before I heard it from those rocketry geeks over at Cape
>>>  Canaveral, but the OED has lots of rocketry/missile launch
>>>  cites (beginning 1953) and no entry for the pop radio usage,
>>>  which is certainly where the "countdown" in shows like
>>>  tonight's transferred from.  It's now very widespread--ESPN,
>>>  for example, uses the device constantly for all sorts of
>>>  shows ranking the top n whatevers (plays of the day, all-time
>>>  comebacks, on-field blow-ups,...).
>>>
>