Shorthand

[prog]

This is a curious image of a reporter writing in shorthand, found by dougo.

My whole life I understood the word "shorthand" as a synonym for "abbreviation", not a complete and formal writing system that looks like alien script to the uninitiated. But the commenters on that photograph say it's so, and Wikipedia agrees, with yet more graphic evidence. Very interesting!

Comments

[theeidolon.livejournal.com]

I thought I heard of shorthand in school around when they were teaching cursive. They
didn't teach it to us, but I know I had heard it mentioned. I thought of it as a highly
modified cursive-like script for fast transcription. I think portable typewriters and
later laptop computers have made it almost completely obsolete.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

When I was a kid I think I had a babysitter who was studying Gregg stenography, and I was sufficiently impressed by the cool secret-writing system that I tried to learn it briefly. But I never got very far.

[keimel.livejournal.com]

Someone in my office knows it, I have seen reporter's notebooks with shorthand in them, I just don't know who they belong to.

[hrafn.livejournal.com]

O.O

Whereas I learned about shorthand as a little kid, most probably from my mom showing me examples that she had done (in school? at some previous job?), so I've (foolishly) always assumed everyone knew it was a real writing system.

I shouldn't keep being surprised by these realizations.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think shorthand used to be much more common knowledge in the days before there was a computer on every desk, when it was common for offices to have secretaries who took dictation.

[lyricon.livejournal.com]

This is just awesome. Like you, I was under the impression that it was more a form of abbreviation. Now I want to learn multiple forms of shorthand so that I can exchange notes with the other five people in the world who still know it. Or so that I can take notes in class with it and impress myself.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

My father learned shorthand at some point early in his career, and I learned a tiny bit from him. The only thing I can remember now is the symbol for "with", which is a c with a line over it in the system he used (probably Gregg).

I never had sufficient need to make the time investment required to learn it properly, and today ubiquitous and compact recording devices largely make it obsolete.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

You may also have been thinking of the peculiar machine shorthand systems used with chorded keyboards, which use letters from the regular alphabet but in strange ways.

[cortezopossum.livejournal.com]

A friend's mom used to use Gregg shorthand for taking dictation where she worked (I worked there too for a while). It used to be a pretty common skill. I looked into it as well but never learned it myself.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think that if you really do need an accurate, fast text record of what somebody else is saying, shorthand in some form is still a good way to do it. The (more popular) alternative is sound recording, but that can still be unreliable in an environment with background noise and chatter, and it still isn't used in contexts where an official record is needed (unless the recording is of a human recorder dictating into a stenomask). Typing on a standard keyboard is too slow to keep up verbatim; you have to summarize.

But shorthand has certainly become a specialty skill rather than a common one. What's really disappeared is the notion that managers and other professionals dictate all their documents to secretaries, who then type them up or hand the transcripts off to someone who types them up. Once there was a computer on every desk, with screen editing and spell check so that even bad typists could produce good-looking output, things changed rapidly.

[queue.livejournal.com]

I learned about it as a kid, because my mom used it in some job.

And the other thing this brings to mind is The Westing Game, where the person takes notes in shorthand, but the other people can't read them because they're in Polish.

[treacle-well.livejournal.com]

Oh gosh. This is one of those things that when one knows it, one assumes everyone does, and I was surprised to read that smart people I know didn't. I actually learned shorthand once, because my boss required it (and had temped in organizations where it was a requirement for certain jobs, even if times had already changed enough that it wasn't even used in most of those jobs anymore). I did use it in that one job for taking minutes at meetings and taking dictation. But that was long ago and these days I can only remember how to write the word "meeting" in shorthand.

BTW, when I was a girl I read one* of those stories for girls featuring spunky, adventurous career-women. In this one the protagonist's shorthand skills helps her figure out some mystery and catch (or point the finger at) the culprit. I totally forget what the plot was, but I remember that bit about the shorthand and that it took place at Cape Canaveral and that is all.

*Actually I read several, but I'm talking about this particular one. I don't remember any others featuring shorthand as a key part of the story.

[oasys.livejournal.com]

Back in the MINT days, Eloise -- who was fluent in shorthand -- gave me a quick demo of the skill. For me, it ranks up there with learning to type on a Dvorak keyboard: something geeky that I'll get around to do someday.

[karlvonl.livejournal.com]

When I was in college, I worked for a while as the IT guy at a company of stenographers, so I got to see these machines being used and marvel at the weird output they produced.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

It's not alien, it's totally D'ni script.

Er, wait, are D'ni aliens? Is "D'ni" a race or a civilization?

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Also, I like this Flickr comment: "hes still on w jiberish setting"

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Also also, I'm really surprised there hasn't been a Mystery Hunt puzzle involving shorthand (or stenotype, or D'ni script for that matter).

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

There's a new volume of the Complete Peanuts out, and it includes a running gag in which Snoopy and Woodstock play "office". Woodstock is Snoopy's "secretary" and takes dictation, and there are often shorthand symbols in the air to show you what Woodstock is doing. You can even find them by looking up "shorthand" in the index.

Woodstock says

[prog.livejournal.com]

||| |||||| ||| |||!

[prog.livejournal.com]

And I just left a comment on the photo that links back to this LJ thread, which might be even more awesome.

[radtea.livejournal.com]

In a fit of orthogonal geekery, I interpreted your comment to mean "Dene' script", which I figured was probably similar to written Cree (although apparently the syllabic representation of Athabaskan languages is no longer much used.) On that basis I was going to suggest that "civilization" was probably a better designation than "race", but as D'ni turns out NOT to be yet another Anglicization of Dene' there isn't really much I can say about the question!