Our deal of the day today is a set of GMRS two-way radios, but come one, nobody calls them that.  They're walkie-talkies, and despite the mild silliness of the name, I happen to think it's dumb to pretend otherwise.  For as long as anyone can remember, cordless, handheld radios have always been called walkie-talkies, and they probably always will be.  But who coined the name?

After a little Internet research, I was surprised to learn that the name walkie-talkie actually predates the familiar handsets associated with it today.  The original devices nicknamed walkie-talkies were large backpack-mounted radios  developed by Motorola for use by the military in 1940.  As the war raged on, the company eventually perfected handheld radios to replace the packsets.  Motorola called these new radios “Handie Talkies,” but that name proved vastly inferior due to its lack of rhyme.  Instead, the old walkie-talkie nickname stuck, even now into the 21st Century. 

Today, the modern military still uses walkie-talkies that can communicate on a variety of bands and modulation schemes and include encryption capabilities.