New word? / technical term?

[Michael Quinion]

Barbara Need quoted an unnamed respondent:

> Maybe generic, certainly in use in every station I ever worked at
> over a 30 year period. I never encountered "outro" till sometime in
> the 80s, and I have never in my life heard anyone actually USE the
> word, as in "You going to outro this record?"

This term may have slipped into BBC usage in the decades since I left The
Corporation, but in my day, mutter mutter, they were always called back-
announcements, with associated verb "to back-announce". Intros we had in
their myriads, but not outros, a term we would have considered a barbaric
misuse of the language.

But in response to another comment, we did use "pots" for volume controls
(short for "potentiometers", from the old days when they were wire-wound
rotary controls; good heavens, come to think about it, that *was* my day)
as well as "cans" for headphones, from the time when they looked like two
tin cans strapped to your ears (and mightily heavy and uncomfortable they
were, too).


--
Michael Quinion
Editor, World Wide Words
E-mail: wordseditor at worldwidewords.org
Web: http://www.worldwidewords.org

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