Interesting things
The mangled language of our trade
What’s in a word? What’s in a name?
Aerial! It’s one of those words that few people can spell. In the days when customers wrote cheques they would almost always ask, “How do you spell ‘aerial’?” The only ones who rarely asked were school teachers, who I guess were ashamed of their ignorance. They would go ahead and make a guess. Ariel, Aeriel, Arial; these were the most common variants.
Bad spellings are one thing; at least they can generally be understood. Worse is the way many things in the trade have a multiplicity of names, not all of them known or understood by everyone –especially the hapless youth in the wholesalers.
We British, with our usual stubborn eccentricity, say ‘aerial’ when the rest of the world says ‘antenna’. If you say ‘aerials’ to most of the world’s citizens they will think you are talking about photographs taken from aeroplanes. In Britain we call them ‘aerial photographs’ when there are no aerials visible in the shot, and ‘aerial photographs of aerials’ when there are.
But ‘antenna’ is not without its problems. We get emails that mention ‘antenas’, ‘anntennas’ and all the other possible variations on the theme. Some over-educated correspondents tell us about problems with their ‘antennae’, and I visualise these people as millipedes waving their hairy appendages at us. However, I think that even the insular British have to accept ‘antenna’ when transmission is the issue because transmission is an international business. But we should stick to ‘aerial’ for reception issues. Why not, when we have miles on the road signs and we bury the dead six feet under?
The influence of the USA on the terminology of our trade doesn’t stop at ‘antenna’. What always used to call ‘TV distribution systems’ or ‘Communal TV systems’ suddenly became MATV (Master Antenna TV) systems, and later SMATV (the same with satellite added.) It didn’t catch on. Somewhere along the line ‘IRS’ (Integrated Reception System) crept in as well.
I have to admit my guilt here, in that I introduced an Americanism to the British readers of a techy magazine. It caught on and is now used universally. When I first wrote about TV distribution systems for ‘Television’ magazine, back in the 1980s, I found I was stuck for a word or a snappy phrase that would identify the collection of gubbins — the amplifiers, filters, and so forth — at the heart of a system. I hit upon ‘head-end’, which at the time was used by US cable companies to identify their massive reception and distribution hubs. It was a bit cheeky to use the expression for our relatively miniscule equipment, but that didn’t stop me.
Another old chestnut is ‘satellite’, or as it is often spelled, ‘sattelite’. Or ‘satelite’. Or even, ridiculously, ‘statilite.’ I haven’t seen ‘stalactite’ yet though. And although satellites are up there in space well beyond the reach of even our biggest ladders, we do get requests to ‘move the satellite’, or even ‘clean the bird muck off the satellite’. And then of course there’s the plaintive phone call: “The sky’s gone dark…”
When I were a lad, my dad used co-axial cable in his TV aerial business, and that’s what it was always called. Sometimes early DIY men would wire up their aerial using twin flex meant for table lamps, or on one famous occasion very heavy duty armoured cable obviously stolen from the pit. Father would lecture the miscreants thus: “You must use co-axial cable. Nothing else will do the job.” He incanted ‘co-axial cable’ the way a soapbox evangelist would utter ‘the heavenly firmament’.
Coax cable has a centre core (AKA the centre conductor or the inner.) It has non-conductive material around the centre core variously known as the insulation, the dielectric, or the ‘white plastic stuff’. Around that is the screen, or braid, or outer. Then there’s the sheath, or outer insulation. The dielectric sometimes has holes running along its length like letters in rock. That type of cable was always known as ‘semi-airspaced’ to differentiate it from ‘air-spaced’ (which had no solid material in the dielectric at all except spacers every few inches) but now ‘air-spaced’ has come to mean ‘semi-airspaced’.
When UHF TV commenced we had to start using a better quality of coax and this became known as ‘low loss’, meaning that it lost less signal per unit length than the cable we’d always used, which was was suddenly dubbed ‘standard’. Soon ‘low loss’ became known as ‘Joe Loss’, which will be lost on those of you who are much younger than me.
At first we were all overawed by the alleged difficulties of receiving UHF signals. The BBC’s Engineering Information Dept was at pains to tell us that only the finest lowest loss cable would do. But as the years passed the tuners in the sets became more sensitive, and so the cable quality race to the bottom begun. By the 1990s cable was being sold as low loss that was inferior both in mechanical characteristics and in signal losses to the old ‘standard’ stuff. Luckily satellite came along. At first it needed 50Ω cable as thick as your thumb but before long it settled into using a properly screened mechanically robust 75Ω coax, and for those of us who hated the poor quality cables widely available for UHF this was a godsend because the cable (generically CT100) was ideal for UHF as well as satellite. With the growth of the interference problem posed by badly designed domestic equipment the 100% screen in CT100 types became all the more important. These cables have a screen comprising a copper foil wrap and a mesh braid, which has led some people to call them ‘double screened’. Here lies confusion because ‘double screened’ actually means that the cable has two concentric screens separated by insulation.
Once CT100 and other 100% screened cables were readily available we came to think of ‘low loss’ as the ultimate misnomer: cables labelled thus were actually ‘high loss’ compared to the stuff we preferred to use. The DIY sheds sell horrible cable they call ‘low loss’ and decent cable they call ‘satellite’, thus confusing the customer into buying inferior cable (but at a steep price) for use with an aerial.
Just as the quality of mass-market domestic coaxial cable declined as the years passed, so its name contracted, first to ‘co-ax’, and then to ‘coax’. The last one has another meaning so bad jokes have become possible when installers are trying to persuade (or coax, geddit?) a cable to pass down a narrow duct.
The next word to explode on the scene was ‘digital’. Suddenly everything was digital. Even things that couldn’t by any stretch of the truth have anything digital in them or about them other than the customer’s digit when it pressed the ‘on’ switch were dubbed ‘digital’. The word when applied to aerials was nonsensical because an aerial doesn’t know whether the electrons on its dipole are dancing to an analogue or a digital jig. Nevertheless marketing always trumps technology, so everything from the aerial to the coax plug was suddenly labelled digital. Even to this day people ring up and ask for a digital aerial, and can you blame them given how they have been bombarded with marketing hogwash?
I’m not saying there’s no place for the word ‘digital’. ‘Digital radio’ means DAB, and arguably radio carried by the TV platforms and on the Internet, and clearly excludes FM and AM. By the way, the fact that ‘digital listening’ includes, in official statistics, the TV platforms and the Internet is fudged to inflate the apparent rate of the growth of DAB, and thus to justify the discontinuing of FM and AM.
The BBC insisted for years on calling FM radio ‘VHF’, presumably to differentiate it from HF or MF radio, whilst the rest of the world called it ‘FM’, to distinguish it from AM. Now we have DAB, which is carried on VHF frequencies, the BBC has to call FM, ‘FM’. Meanwhile, some DAB-only radio stations call themselves ‘Something-FM’. No wonder the public is confused. And as I write this I’m listening to Classic FM on Freeview, which is of course a digital platform.
We even have naming confusion with hardware and equipment. Installers, is it a ‘roof ladder’ or a ‘crawler’ that you use? Is the thing you fix the aerial to a ‘mast’ or a ‘pole’? Is the thing you use to fix it there a ‘clamp’ or a ‘bracket’? If it’s a bracket, what do you call the thing that fixes the mast to the chimney? Do you call your main test equipment item a spectrum analyser, a speccy, an analyser, or simply, ‘my meter’? If you are checking line power do you use an AVO, a multimeter, or a voltmeter? (Please don’t say you shove a screwdriver across it and look for a spark.) The plug that fits into the back of the telly – is it a coax plug, an IEC plug, or a Belling plug? And if you want to join two of these plugs together do you use a line connector, a through connector, a converter, a barrel, a Belling male/male adaptor, or what? If there’s a fitment on the wall for the aerial connection is it a wallplate or an aerial socket? To connect between that item and the TV set you need a flylead, a patch cord, or a male-to male signal cable; take your pick but they’re identical. And incidentally, when people say ‘the aerial’s been cut’, they don’t mean a maniac’s been on the roof with a machete, they mean the coax has been damaged (usually by an innocent soul pruning her roses; should have gone to Specsavers…)
TV channels and platforms are also subjects for semantic confusion. To many people ‘Sky’ means ‘satellite’ — and more alarmingly ‘satellite’ is synonymous with Sky. The distinction between satellite TV, TV from an aerial, and cable TV is also not perfectly clear to many viewers. There again, I still find it odd that we buy our electricity from British Gas, and that we buy our clean water from Yorkshire Water but Severn-Trent take away the dirty water.
Of course Freeview and Freesat are to many people completely interchangeable; hence many a receiver has been incorrectly bought and a fruitless attempt made to connect it to the wrong signal source, be it dish or aerial.
Another way disingenuous wordings are used to hoodwink Joe Public occurs in the sale of new TV sets. No-one would knowingly buy an SD (Standard Definition) telly for the living room now that High Definition is well established, but still people are coming home with a set advertised as ‘HD ready’. That sounds very much as if the set is completely ready for HD, and when connected to an HD signal will produce an HD picture. In fact the manufacturers use ‘HD ready’ to mean that the set has an HDMI socket that will accept an HD signal from an external receiver. In other words, it’s misleading and you might even say it’s a scam.
This semantic and technological confusion is not new. Right back when there was only one channel it was widely believed that the picture came down the co-axial inner and the sound came down the outer. When ITV started, this hypothesis had to be abandoned in favour of a belief that the BBC came down the inner and ITV came down the outer. When there were just the two channels people used to call BBC TV the Home Service and ITV the Light Programme, and I still hear old people say, “This is rubbish; let’s see what’s on the other side.” But that was the past, which is another world. Nowadays we have our own misapprehensions, and they are many and various indeed.