New word? / technical term?

[Barbara Need]

Well, I just got another response which distinguishes between an
outro and a back-announcement:

> I was in professional radio in California from 1973 until the late
> 90s, and Outro has always been a common and appropriate term for
> the ending announcement of a radio program (NOT for saying the
> title of the record just played; that is "back-announce"). I never
> heard "extro" until the late 90s, maybe 1998, and it sounds very
> odd and unprofessional to me. Maybe extro is Canadian, but it is
> foreign to me.

Barbara

On 12 Feb 2008, at 10:37, Michael Quinion wrote:

> 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org