Lost Word Of The Day (68)

There is no doubt that the introduction of the telegraph and the Morse Code revolutionised the way our forefathers communicated, opening up the possibility of talking to the other side of the world. The only drawback is that the technology at the time was unable to carry speech and each word had to be laboriously broken down to each of its letters and transcribed into the appropriate series of dots and dashes in accordance with the Morse code for that letter. A telegraph operator had to be literate, quick, and accurate as well as being letter perfect in their ability to transcribe messages into and out of code.   

Learning the code was a bit of a fag and to make memorising the format of each letter easier students would call a dot and iddy and a dash an umpty, sounds which roughly replicated the noise made by the telegraph machine emitted when it transmitted them. In the late 1900s iddy-umpty had become an affectionate term for Morse code.

As the telegraph has gone the way of the fax, there is little call to band iddy-umpty about. What a shame.