"Sid Schweiger" wrote in message
...
(in fact, KDKA's first general manager, whose name I've forgotten, is
considered to have coined the word "broadcast")

That would be a neat trick, seeing as how one cannot coin a word that already
exists. The term "broadcast" came from agriculture.

Okay...so let's see how this relates....

There's a place in Greece called Marathon. It's been there for a long time, but
before the battle of Marathon, and before Phidippides ran to Athens from there,
Marathon was always a place, not a race. That's coinage.

Spam was (and still is) a once-ubiquitous canned meat, that some people found
appeared in many undesirable places and after a time, despised. It's a word that's
been around for some 75 years. Now it's the email glut that, after a time, most of
us despise. That's coinage.

Gay used to mean happy. Glad. Merry. Cheery. Sunny. Bright. Still does, for that
matter. Now it also means someone who is sexually attracted to someone of the same
sex. That's coinage.

So (or sew). Broadcast, when used in the context of an agricultural effort, means to
spread seed over a wide area. Seeing as radio has nothing to do with farming, when
Frank Conrad (I've since found a reference for this...and of course, Conrad was one
of the main protagonists in KDKA's beginnings, but never its general manager)
appropriated a word which is suggestive of how radio waves propagate, and how he
intended to use that property, he coined the term in the context most understood
today. If you consult http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=broadcast, you'll see
that agricultural sense, the transitive form, as in spreading seed, is considered the
word's fourth sense. But Conrad's word also took on an intransitive verb form,
requiring no object at all, and a noun form. Neither of these has an analogous sense
in agriculture. That's coinage.
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