MEET CUTE

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled 

It was with a happy shock of surprise that the new head of corporate communications, Marnie Smart, realized the existence of an acronym which was shared between the realms of aviation and linguistics. The acronym was ELT, which appeared in Smart’s draft press release of May 1 in the technical sense of Emergency Locator Transmitter, a device carried aboard commercial aircraft required by law to transmit its location via an AM signal containing a swept tone ranging from 1600 Hz to 300 Hz with between two and four sweeps per second. The press release reviewed the history of the device, beginning with the development of automatic distress beacons before the war, continuing through some of the more dramatic rescue efforts of the midcentury (teen pilot Janice Mainwaring, wrecked on a remote atoll; Congressman Carton, crashed in a dense forest) that hastened refinement of the device, and finally outlining a new model that the company hoped would become the industry standard. Smart’s counterpart in the overseas office, Carl Simonson, received the draft release and called her immediately. “He remarked that it was the finest piece of English-language prose he had ever read,” said Simonson’s assistant, Barbara Morton, “and that he almost regretted that it would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into other languages.” This trigged in Smart’s mind the second meaning of the acronym: the journal English Literature in Translation. She related this coincidence to Barbara Morton six years later, when they were married.