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September 1

Channel surfing, zapping during the radio days

I'm wondering how one used to express the action of constantly changing channels on the radio (as in turning the knob), say, up until the 1950s. Rebecca West uses the word "swing" in the 1930s ("Nevertheless there was always good music provided by some station or other at any time in the day, and I learned to swing like a trapeze artist from programme to programme of it"), but that probably wasn't a common way of describing it. Was there perhaps another verb or phrase which had taken this meaning, the way 'zapping' had during the heyday of television (and remote control)? Thanks in advance. ---Sluzzelin talk 16:37, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly "twiddling the dial"?. I wasn't around in the 1950s (ha!), but the phrase was certainly used in the 1970s, to refer to TVs as well as radios. Our first TV had a dial for changing channels; preset buttons came later. --Viennese Waltz 17:05, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a forum post that supports my answer: "Back in the days when radio was the primary means of electronic entertainlment (yes, there was such a time) and one tuned it by turning a dial, some people were constantly fiddling with the tuner either to try to get better reception (since old tuners (variable capacitors) tended to wander off frequency) or to see what was on another station. If others were in the room and annoyed by the this practice, they were apt to say "Stop twiddling the dial!!" Thus "twiddling" has a mildly pejorative sense. The modern equivalent of the radio-dial twidler is the person with a TV remote control who constantly changes the channel and annoys others in the room." [1] --Viennese Waltz 17:09, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent! Thanks Wiener Walzer! ---Sluzzelin talk 17:13, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Someone constantly fiddling is annoying, but I think the primary sense of "twiddling the dial" in the context of radio was doing this too get good reception, not to get a good program. I suspect the use of the verb zap for changing TV channels came from the imagined similarity of a remote to that staple of SF, a zap gun – used with emotional satisfaction to blast whatever crap was being shown into oblivion – and that the current sense of a repetitive action came only later. In the radio days we had "stations", not "channels". Unlike the ease of just pressing a button on the remote, you had to tune in to a station. This required some care or you might hear a whining heterodyne. There are uses where people "keep twiddling the dial", but in vain attempts to get any signal. For a (not specifically annoying) effort to find a nice program, I think simply "changing the station" was more likely to be used. In this passage the narrator uses that terminology. --Lambiam 17:52, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Sigh. Here are some examples of "twiddling the dial" being used to find a good station: [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] --Viennese Waltz 18:37, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

All of those seem to be modern works, not texts from the era in question, though. What did people back then actually say? --Khajidha (talk) 19:15, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Lambiam, isn't it possible that "zap" comes from when remotes made audible clicks? Temerarius (talk) 22:26, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

It is possible in the sense that I cannot exclude it. The clicking sound is not something I'd have described as a zap, though. I find the analogy with a zap gun seductive, but my theory is not stronger than a suspicion.

Khajidha, I’m not going to be able to give you proper sources because all my finds have tended to be in books without preview. Examples are in the collapsed box below. People seemed to use several words: twirl, twiddle, twist and flick when talking about the dial and tinker when talking about the radio in general. You can compare these (sort of) in ngram [7] which seems to suggest tinker was the first favourite, followed by twirl and then twist. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 22:48, 1 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Examples of actual usage 1929-1947

1927, Wallaces' Farmer and Iowa Homestead - Volume 52 - Page 972: No doubt a lot of radio fans are content with a few stations, but I twirl the dials a lot and am constantly searching ... twirling, and twisting the dials until I am asked to stop that nonsense, tune in some music and listen
1929, Popular Science - May 1929 - Page 62 Vol. 114, No. 5 - ‎Magazine: O MATTER how you twirl the dials on your radio set, you often find that you can't get dance music just when your guests feel in the mood for dancing
1929, Popular Science - Jul. 1929 - Page 70 Vol. 115, No. 1 - ‎Magazine : ”OHN, I do believe you'd be tickled to death if something went wrong with that radio set, just so you'd have an excuse to tinker with it,” my wife observed one evening after she'd watched me twirl the dial on our single control set.
1937, LIFE - Oct. 18, 1937 - Page 9 Vol. 3, No. 16 - ‎Magazine: Noiv you can enjoy a G-E Touch Tuning Radio for no more than you would pay for a good conventional hand-dialed radio. No more dialing! No dials to twist, twirl, or swish.
1937, Radio - Issues 215-224 - Page 64: Or would you park yourself beside the BC set and twiddle the dial all evening in search of something of interest
1940, Magazine - Volumes 11-12 - Page 12 Boston and Maine Railroad: “Well," said the Switchman,“ they can spout that stuff all they want to; I don ' t listen to i . When one of those birds comes on I just twist the dial and
1941, Music Clubs Magazine - Volumes 21-23 - Page 6 : After supper when pleasantly relaxed I ' d probably twiddle the dial in search of a string quartet weaving some tuneful theme
1947, Sales Management - Page 8: Too often they merely flick the dial over to the symphonic hour.
1947, Conquest... - Page 492 Carol Hovious, ‎George Whitefield Norvell: do we let the radio run, listening to whatever happens along? Do we twiddle with the dial until we find something we like?

These date from after the radio-only period, but according to the "Hacker's Dictionary" -- "frob, twiddle, and tweak sometimes connote points along a continuum. Frob connotes aimless manipulation; twiddle connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; tweak connotes fine-tuning."

-- AnonMoos (talk) 01:32, 2 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

On Google Books Ngrams Viewer "(changing the station)+(searching for a station)" gets comparable results to "twisting the dial". Of course, neither implies someone constantly doing this. In the examples above the verbs by themselves also do not imply repeated changing like zap does for TV channel switching; inasmuch as repetition is clear from the text this sense comes from the context (constantly searching ... until I am asked to stop). --Lambiam 09:38, 2 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

In the days when there were only two television channels in the UK, we used to "turn over". Alansplodge (talk) 19:51, 2 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you again, all of you! I admit I hadn't thought enough about what constitutes zapping. What Rebecca West did (changing the channel whenever the music ended and was followed by "talks and variety programmes") is the not same thing as someone annoyingly zapping or frobbing through the channels, while everyone else in the room can't keep up and gets exasperated. ---Sluzzelin talk 19:53, 2 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]