Re[3]: Good news from England!

[Mike Westbrook <mwest@atc-1s.HAC.COM>]

}On Fri, 15 Dec 1995 Lev Polinsky <polinsky@husc.harvard.edu> wrote:
}...
}And finally, on a completely unrelated note:
}A contest asks what HMV stands for.  I'm guessing Her Majesty's 
}Vsomething, but does anyone know?
}
}--LP.
}

Speaking as someone who's seen more old vinyl than compact disks, it quite
possibly stands for "His Master's Voice", you know, with the picture of the
little doggie listening to the Victrola, used at least in North America by
RCA Victor.  Don't know enough early recording history, but I would guess
that there was a Victor company that made Victrolas that RCA conglomerated
at some point, which could mean that there was a Mr. Victor whose initials
were H.M. or something and who cleverly invented an auxiliary slogan that
duplicated his own initials, and who might have had a little doggie at home
with whom he liked to play mind games using his home recording studio.  (Can
you imagine trying to boot a concert using vinyl LP cutter technology?!)
It's not too much of a leap to think that some descendant of this company
went into the record selling business.

Of course, the "Her Majesty's Vsomething" idea has its own merits--maybe
there's a "V" word that rhymes with "Regina"...  I do know that on one of
the old versions of the Canadian one dollar bill, you could fold up the
portrait to show the Queen's bum.  (That's "bum", not "Mum", for you royal
watchers.)  On a related note (and the relations are getting more and more
tenuous), one of the bits of cultural exchange picked up by the Who listers
at the Who convention in London was how to fold the current ten pound note
to convert the portraits of the Queen and of Charles Dickens into an eerily
uncanny likeness of John McEnroe...

> Mike <