Mayday is the radio word a ship or plane uses when it is in serious danger and needs help at once. The call is said three times — Mayday, mayday, mayday — so it cannot be missed in noise. It is not a polite request and not a weather report; it means lives may be lost if help does not come. Though actually, it has nothing to do with the month of May, even though it sounds that way. In the 1920s a radio officer at Croydon Airport in England, Frederick Stanley Mockford, was asked for a distress word that English and French pilots would both catch. Much of the traffic then ran between Croydon and Le Bourget in Paris, so he chose the sound of French m'aider, short for Venez m'aider!, ‘Come and help me!’ There is a weaker radio call, pan-pan, for trouble that is serious but not yet life-or-death. Mayday is the strongest. On land, people sometimes say it half-jokingly when they are in a mess, but the real use is still ships, planes, and other radio distress.