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

[Jonathan Lighter]

"Tune in, turn on, drop out."

What's the problem?

JL

On Tue, Apr 3, 2012 at 3:58 PM, W Brewer <brewerwa at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       W Brewer <brewerwa at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Stay tuned" - the all-digital generation doesn't get
> this
>              phrase (UNCLASSIFIED)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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