From:  HenHanna <HenHanna@dev.null>
Date:  05 Oct 2024 03:05:25 Hong Kong Time
Newsgroup:  news.alt119.net/sci.lang
Subject:  

Re: SOS became the international maritime distress signal (3/10/1906)

NNTP-Posting-Host:  null

On Fri, 4 Oct 2024 9:29:32 +0000, Ross Clark wrote:

> On 4/10/2024 8:14 p.m., HenHanna wrote:
>> On Thu, 3 Oct 2024 16:56:19 +0000, Aidan Kehoe wrote:
>>>
>>>  Ar an triú lá de mí Deireadh Fómhair, scríobh Ross Clark:
>>>
>>>  > ...---...
>>>  > At the First International Radiotelegraph Convention, in Berlin. The
>>> Germans
>>>  > had already begun using this signal.
>>>
>>> “In both the 1 April 1905 German law and the 1906 international
>>> regulations,
>>> the distress signal is specified as a continuous Morse code sequence of
>>> three
>>> dots / three dashes / three dots, with no mention of any alphabetic
>>> equivalents.”
>>>
>>> So the specification of the dots and dashes came first, and given there
>>> were
>>> two common alphanumeric encodings for Morse code at the time, the
>>> alphanumeric
>>> meaning was not then specified.
>>>
>>>  > "neither so short as to be ambiguous nor so long as to be unwieldy"
>>>  > (Crystal worded this with "too", which seems wrong.)
>>
>>
>>                What was the sentence with "TOO" ?
>
> "neither too short to be ambiguous nor too long to be unwieldy"
>
> which doesn't make sense when you think about it.
> Book needed an editor.
>


       or a better one (an editor).


i didn't get it at first,   but you're right....
considering,  e.g.


         Bob is too big to fit into that spot.

         Bob is too big to be comfortable in that spot.