Roderick in Jacksonville, Florida, says patients in his cardiac electrophysiology practice often look at the tangle of EKG wires on their chests and joke that now they’re wired for sound. What’s the origin of this phrase? Although to wire meaning add wiring to something is much older, wired for sound emerged as a colloquial phrase in the late 1920s when movie theaters were being fitted with sound systems for talking pictures. The phrase soon was used to describe any space with microphones or loudspeakers. P.G. Wodehouse used it in the 1940s to describe someone using an ear trumpet. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Movie Theaters Gave Us the Phrase “Wired for Sound””
Hi.
You have A Way with Words.
Hi, Martha.
Hi, Grant.
My name’s Roderick.
I’m calling from Jacksonville, Florida.
Proud supporter of member station WJCT eighty nine nine, Jacksonville.
Ville.
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All right!
Nice!
Rodney.
I I’ve appreciate been practicing.
Got the patter down cold.
What’s up, Roger?
Yeah, yeah.
So I work in a cardiac electro physiology practice.
So electro physiology, that’s the management of heart rhythm disorders.
And obviously a big part of that is doing EKGs or ECGs, electrocardiograms.
That’s sort of like the gold standard for detecting heart arrhythmias.
And so, an EKG is, I put these electrode stickers all over your chest and your belly, and then I hook you up to all these wires.
And so I do that about 25 to 30 times a day.
So I see about 25, 30 patients a day.
And a phrase that I get a lot is, now I’m wired for sound or, oh, I’m wired for sound.
And I am just wondering where that came from and what that means.
The patients say that, really?
Yes, the patients say that.
They look down at their chest, their belly, they see all these wires running across them, you know, this spider web of wires, of colorful wires, and, you know, they go, Oh, you know, I’m wired for sounds.
This is another whole call that we should do another time, Martha, about all these common responses that somebody like Roger hears all the time, but the person saying it thinks it’s original or first time used.
Yeah.
That’s a great idea.
I’m thinking all I’ve ever said is, That’s cold!
Right.
Yep.
That’s another one.
Yep.
Well, alright.
So there are two kind of high points of what I’m about to tell you.
And then one of them is the telegraph, and another one is the movie business.
But let’s go back a little further in that.
Wire as a, you know, an extruded metal strand has existed for a very long time.
It was used before electricity.
It was even mastered by humans to make jewelry or as a fastener and for other purposes.
But when the telegraph came along by the 1850s, we get the verb to wire, w I e r, meaning to send someone a message.
Or you could send a wire as the noun, meaning you’re sending them a message over the over the telegraph.
Basically, the signal is transmits over the wire, somebody writes it down on paper, and it turns into a telegram.
That’s when it goes from telegraph to telegram, and ta da!
There you have it.
And then by the 1890s, you start to get people talking about something being wired as an adjective, meaning it’s connected by electrical lines or wires of any kind, or maybe to a power source or any, any kind of electrical apparatus really.
But then our phrase here that you’re asking about, Rajik, this wired for sound phrase emerges in the late 1920s or so as a term of art because cinemas, movie theaters were being fitted with electrical sound equipment so they could present the new talking pictures.
It was this huge transition moment from silent pictures to talking pictures.
And in a lot of business writing in the 1920s, where they’re talking about, you know, basically how to run a cinema And also in advertising, promoting these newfangled developments to customers.
They use that expression wired for sound and it becomes something almost a cliche, but not quite a cliche, but definitely something that stands out at you.
Sometimes even put in quotation marks because they recognize whoever was authoring whatever it was, the advertisement or the business journal article, they recognize that it was this term that had some special outside significance that needed to be set off so that you knew that there was something unusual or important about it.
And if your theater wasn’t wired for sound, you couldn’t show talking pictures, which meant you might go out of business.
But the meaning quickly broadened to describe any space that you might add microphones or loudspeakers.
So you could have, auditoriums, studios, churches, buses, trains, political rallies.
And so very quickly, wired for sounds start to be used anytime wires involve for anything, whether or not there’s sound, whether or not there are movies.
And you find people using a B.
G.
Woodhouse in the 1940s, describes somebody using an ear trumpet, you know, to help her because she was hard of hearing.
He describes she was being wired for sounds.
Interesting.
Roderick, you’ve given people who are getting EKGs something to think about the next time they do, Yep.
You Wired for sound.
So much history.
All right.
Well, thanks, Roger.
Appreciate it.
All doing the hard work out there in the out of the right.
Thanks.
Bye, Well, we’re hoping you’re wired for sound and can talk to us.
The number is (877-929-9673.
