Last night I was trying to explain to a friend who ‘is of a certain age’ what Twitter was, how it worked, and what the attraction was. Inspiration of the sort that usually comes only to the drunk and desperate struck me and I said, “It’s kind of like telegraph messages used to be in the 1800s and early 1900s, only way more common and between many more people. It’s developed the same kind of short-hand code and abbreviations, etc.” [Since she just finished reading a book about people on the Guernsey Islands of England who were occupied by the German Army during WW II and often communicated by telegraph, she knew right away what I meant by that.] So
Paul, do not be dissapointed ( OOPS) spelling. No matter how some things change it is odd how they remain the same. Just a different name for the same thing. Respectfully, Cannonball
That’s really the story of any language…fan from fanatic, hype from hyperbole, et al. We in broadcasting often use a phonetic or short version of a word…I (for interstate) 81 becomes eye eighty one while night becomes nite and light becomes lite. Telegraphically, SOS is famous and as infamous as WAG! Ever see the piece that gets passed around the internet every once in a while that is a paragraph of unspelled and trunkated words? All languages and codes seem to flow toward this kind of thing in social groups. Look at the railroad lexicon that Freeman Hubbard like to sling around; much of that was short wording producing the right image. Hot box instead of overheated journal box. And look at dialects and slang in languages. Ain"t nothin’ wrong with that!
I like this thread. In 2007 and 2008 at Heritage Park in Calgary they had competitions between retired telegrapher’s and teenagers in the audience sending text messages to see who could send a set message faster. In '07 the telegrapher’s won 3 to 0, in '08 it was telegrapher’s 2 to 1 only because the bug the telegrapher was using became disconnected from the telegraph key. They were set up on a less than steady table in a big tent. The one old fellow I talked to who used to live in a bunkhouse with my Dad, back in the early fifties at Lake Louise, said they were quite surprised the first year but may have been overconfident in the second.
The other thing I want to mention is e-mail headers. You wouldn’t believe the shock and amazement I experienced seeing an e-mail header the first time. The similarities between those and the header at the top of a telegram are profound. I was always amused to see computer ask and answer columns where people wanted to know what was going on, and were people trying to send them viruses!
And, there were abacus users who could come up with answers to math problems faster than computer operators because they did the simple parts in their heads and entered those results on their abaci, whereas the computer users entered every operation.
I was in a technical class which had a portion with a lot of heavy duty math. Pocket calculators were just coming onto the market, and slide rules were still relatively common. Nonetheless, the folks using plain old pencil and paper often finished ahead of the others.