A search for information tonight about stenography/closed captioning machines led me to a passing interest in shorthand. I never knew there were so many systems of shorthand. Eric Lee’s page, here, has an overview of some of the available systems. I’m kind of intrigued by Teeline, and there are quite a few books available on Amazon teaching the Teeline system, but what a Herculean effort it would be to wrap my mind around these squiggles!

What I would like to draw your attention to, however, is about halfway down the page: “Alphabetic Shorthand Systems.”

My friend was looking over my shoulder and saw the shorthand sentence for “The book is new and I can get it for you,” namely, “. bk s nu & i k gt i f u.” She exclaimed, “Look, that says ‘u’! People have been texting long before we have!”

She’s right. Our generation is not the first to contribute to the decline of language, hooray!