A plea

There's a paragraph in one of Annie Dillard's books that I remember often. In my version of it, British pilots are flying bombing missions over France in World War II. They get hit by an AA gun or an enemy aircraft and as they know they are going down they call out to any able and friendly Frenchman, m'aidez, m'aidez, m'aidez, as they are jumping out of their planes to near certain death.

Eventually, after the war, this gets adopted internationally and vulgarized into Mayday. I can imagine a generation of pilots learning that you have to yell the international distress call into their radios if something terrible happens so that someone knows to try to help you. "Mayday, mayday, mayday." But they don't realize the simple poetry of it.

"Help me, help me, help me."