Madman Muntz and TV

[Wilson Gray]

FWIW, I never knew that "Madman Muntz" was a real person till ca.1953,
when I saw a picture and a description of the Cadillac-based Muntz
automobile - "0-60 in 7 (seconds)!" - in a publication on hotrods. I
had long since heard of "Madman Muntz" on both radio and ,uh, TV, but
I considered the name to be a joke. In those days of Jim-Crow yore, I
had no concept of the full range of white-ethnic - indeed, even the
idea of "white-ethnic" was unknown to me - names and I simply didn't
believe that a name like "Muntz" could possibly be real.

In those days, arnold, had I come across the name, "zwicky," there's
no way that I could have been persuaded that it truly existed.
Instead, I would have been ROTFLMAO!

The most "ridiculous" name that I knew to be real, at that time, was
"Flipper," the name of the branch of my family descended from Henry
Flipper, the first black graduate of West Point.

The only names that I was familiar with, exaggerating only slightly,
were "Smith" and "Jones."

-Wilson

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 3:00 PM, Mark Mandel <thnidu at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Mark Mandel <thnidu at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Madman Muntz and TV
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 1:39 PM, Arnold M. Zwicky
> <zwicky at csli.stanford.edu> wrote:
>> On Aug 26, 2008, at 9:44 AM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>> Call letters are assigned by the FCC, and there can be AM, FM, and
>>> television stations with the same call letters in the same market. The
>>> suffix is very helpful in distinguishing these media for publicity and
>>> publication (see cites below), but I don't believe it's an official
>>> part of the call letters. Unless the "TV" part of the name is
>>> explicitly attested, I wouldn't call either of those an antedate.
>>
>> agreed.  but note that Ben Zimmer merely suggested that the station
>> names might have *had a big influence* on the use of "TV".
>>
>> so the question is when uses of "TV" as a noun (a mass noun for the
>> medium, a count noun meaning 'television set') appeared.
>
> Ah. Yes, conceded.
>
> --
> Mark Mandel
>
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