Word: shorthand
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...himself, the voice of the poet addressing an audience, and the voice of the poet talking with imaginary characters; certainly Eliot's choices Monday night conformed to his distinctions: some of the poems were nearly impossible to follow in a reading, because they were in Eliot's own psychological shorthand, and spoken as though he were thinking out loud. The dramatic poems were easier to follow, and easiest of all were those addressed to an audience. It is only in these last, clearly orated poems that Eliot seemed conscious that he was reading publicly, and then he was magnificent...
...17th century French scholar-the ancient Greeks gave human qualities to the planets. Mars, the red planet, was considered male, and the Greek word for Mars, Thouros, was abbreviated to "Th," or α. In the hands of careless and hasty penmen, this symbol eventually degenerated into δ. The same shorthand fate overtook the female planet, Venus, whose Greek name Phosphorus was reduced to Ph (Φ) and subsequently-perhaps by the same careless Grecians-to ø. When medieval alchemists came upon these symbols, they found them useful: δ (Mars) was associated with hard iron, φ (Venus) with softer copper. Later...
Invented by a seven-man committee, including Conservative M. P. Isaac James Pitman (grandson of shorthand's Sir Isaac Pitman), the all-lower-case new alphabet is longer than the old one. While eliminating q and x, it retains all other conventional letters and adds 19 new sound symbols (e.g., ae in the first line of the sample above). In theory, this reduces some 2,000 letter sounds in the regular alphabet to a piano-sized 88. Using the new system, a few retarded readers have already been rapidly cured. But the obvious problem is what happens later, when...
Though she usually writes at top speed, in a sort of typewriter shorthand later expanded to a first and practically final version, Ship of Fools has been in the making for 20 years-"or 30 if I count how long I thought about it." Based on a diary she kept on a 1931 voyage from Veracruz to Bremerhaven aboard a German ship crowded with Teutonic, Anglo-Saxon and Latin types, Ship of Fools is an oceangoing Grand Hotel, which tells in parable form of the slothful, harmless and irresponsible people who made possible the rise of fascism. "I took...
...leisure," writes Critic George Steiner in The Kenyan Review. "Music today is the central fact of lay culture." While music soars, argues Steiner, language suffers, as evidenced by advertising lingo, by the intrusion of science's untranslatable symbols into language and, in literature, by Hemingway's "lyric shorthand" and the inarticulateness of Arthur Miller's heroes. Says Steiner: "When one is tired, music, even difficult music, is easier to enjoy than serious literature. The new middle class in the affluent society reads little, but listens to music with a knowing delight. Where the library shelves once stood...