History of Beep

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi guys, it’s Bruce from Ocean View, Delaware.

What’s going on?

Well, not long ago I had my daughter in timeout for hitting one of her brothers. She was either Garrett or Wyatt, one of the two. And so she earned herself a little timeout. And so I sat her down and I set the timer on the microwave for a minute and a half. That’s about how old she was, a year and a half at the time. And so she did her little time and I said, okay, time’s up when the microwave beeps. It went beep, beep, beep. And so she went about her way, and I got to thinking, beep, that’s a weird little word. Microwaves beep, and trucks beep when they back up, and horns beep, but these are all modern things. What about when, you know, before there were cars and microwaves and electronic devices that beep? Why would there be a word beep?

Well, there wasn’t. I mean, but think about living in a pre-beep world. I mean, the beep was probably music to your daughter’s ears, right? Sure. But beeps drive me crazy. You walk down the aisle of a toy store and everything’s beeping? Oh, my gosh. Everything beeps. The microwave is a great culprit, right? Because every button press makes a beep. Yeah. And it makes a beep when it goes off. That’s what I was wondering. Was it a word that was made up to describe the sound that these things make? The sound that car horns make, I think, first. Yeah, I think it was. Early on, the early 1900s. But it’s interesting. I mean, car horns had a lot of different sounds starting out. I mean, yeah, I don’t know how you spell that exactly. Like a clown’s horn kind of honk. Yeah, that, that, and some of them had bells on them. In fact, you can go online. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, Bruce. You might enjoy this or do this with your daughter maybe and your kids. Go online. There are sites where you can go and listen to old car horns from, say, 1910, 1911. And your kids will like them. Some of them sound pretty flatulent. They don’t really sound like the beeps that we think of as beeps or honks today. But beep, as far as I can tell, started out in the early 1900s with car horns and then got applied to beeping devices, electronic devices. It’s imitative, onomatopoeic. It’s our verbal representation of what we’re hearing. Maybe not all that accurate, but it kind of stuck. Right, right, right. That was fun. Okay. Yeah, that’s cool.

And it’s funny because you might think that beep is a lot older, right? I would think. But what’s beeping before car horns? What’s beeping in Beowulf? Nothing. Nothing beeps in Beowulf. No microwaves. And it was one of those words that just stuck to me for some reason. It’s one of those things that just keep saying it over and over again. Why does that stuck to me? So that’s the way that you time your child’s time out? We do. She’s actually going on two now, so she’ll have two minutes for the next time out. She’s doing the big time now. Well, she’s almost up to the popcorn length, right? So there’s a little snack that she’s done. That’s right. Yeah, how does she feel about that microwave? Oh, it’s the worst. I’m a big, bad meanie. I know the feeling, brother. My five-year-old thinks I’m the worst person in the world sometimes. And his hero. Right, right, right. But then after the time, it’s all good. Well, great. Bruce, thank you for calling. Thank you so much. Thanks, it was fun. All right, bye-bye. Bye-bye.

We should make a list of those sounds that didn’t exist before, well, modern devices existed. There’s tons of that stuff, right? Well, and blooper, right? Made derived from the sound of a radio. The blooper as you switch from signal to signal? Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. Then there’s to be bleeped. That’s later. Yeah, much later. Yeah. Yeah. To be bleeped out when something naughty is said. Not that we ever would do that here. Never. Ever. If you’ve got something to say, naughty or not, 877-929-9673. Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.