> And telegraph operators can spell also. No silly abbreviations.
Yup. Like almost everyone else of that 'day and age', they had been
*taught* properly.
On the other hand, telegraphers, and later radio-telegraphers, *did* make _heavy_ use of abbreviations, and other short-hand 'codes', for operational management 'stuff'. Sometimes they were used when passing "customer" message traffic, where what went across the wire was "not exactly" what the customer had said/written -- effectively a limited form of 'data compression', in addition to the "run-length limited" encoding methodology.
As one example, consider the antecedents of the radio-telegraphy "Is anybody out there?"/"Can anybody hear me?" inquiry.
Or the infamous "Q-codes".
U R SO RITE ! :)
Anybody else remember:
A B C D Goldfish?
L M N O Goldfish!
or C D B ?
Entire illustrated _books_ full of of this nonsense.
Seriously ... my high-school daughter tells me there is now a
> substantial problem with youngsters who supposedly can *only* write in
> text-message abbreviations or "l33tsp33k" and have developed some kind
> of mental block against producing plain English. She, a skilled
> writer, is annoyed with them, of course.
> Accompaying this is an inability to think about language. At one
> point she was trying to refer to the band "U2" but her interlocutor
> (in a chat room) could only see "U2" as "you too" and communication > failed.
'context' and 'frame of reference' are _everything_.
e.g., a pre-occupied graphics-programmer friend was going down the soft-drinks isle at the local grocery store, when a label caught his eye. "Hi Res", that's a funny name for a soft-drink, he thought. Then realized it was the brand of root-beer.
And, as a youngster, I was _firmly_convinced_ that coyotes could fly. After all, I heard it repeatedly from my father, reading from one of my favorite 'read aloud to children' books, And _he_ wouldn't lie to me about such things, would he?
What I _heard_: The blackbird cried: "I see a coyote! I see a coyote! And then he flew away."
What was _in_print_: The blackbird cried, "I see a coyote! I see a coyote!", and then he flew away.
Lastly, please consider the difference between 'unionized', and "unionized".
What? You don't see any difference?
But, the first word describes the presence of a collective bargaining unit, while the other one describes the absence of ionization.