"Stay tuned" - the all-digital generation doesn't get this phrase (UNCLASSIFIED)

W Brewer brewerwa at GMAIL.COM
Tue Apr 3 19:58:39 UTC 2012


Mullins, Bill wrote: <<<Seventy years ago, "staying tuned" was an active
process.  By the sixties, it was passive.>>>
WB: Just a few short decades ago, when first I came to Taiwan shores, my
only real link to the outside world was a cheap Sony short-wave receiver,
which required constant fiddling of knobs and sliders, not to mention
getting a good antenna setup. Keeping the BBC World Report locked in
required constant attention. A vanished world, swept away by the internet.
 It seems to me that the use of TUNE in the electronic context should have
had its source in the musical: to tune a violin, piano; a tuning fork; hum
a tune. Get in tune with. Get your car in tune and it will just hum along.

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