Have you ever heard the expression "like a broken record"? It is not often used as an endearing term. What it basically means is enduring the annoyance of hearing something repeated over and over again. Its derivation is somewhat generational. You see, before downloaded music, there were CDs; before CDs there were cassettes; before cassettes there were 8-tracks; and before 8-tracks there were records, and records had to be played on a record player. I won't go into the technical aspects of how the sound got from the record to the speakers, but in its most basic form, the arm on a record player had a needle that picked up the sound, which was embedded in grooves on the surface of the record. Every once in a while a piece of dust or a small imperfection on the surface of the record would cause the needle to stick in a groove. Whenever that happened, the music would repeat over and over again until the needle was nudged out of its stuck position to play the rest of the record. This repetition, which could be quite annoying, gave birth to the expression "like a broken record."
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