Word: shorthand
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Between the years when Sir Isaac Pitman and John R. Gregg devised their competing shorthand systems (as any stenographer knows, Gregg's is now predominant in the U.S.), a man named Andrew Graham developed a Pitmanish shorthand scheme that resembled, as much as any script, Arabic. By the time he was 17, Woodrow Wilson had all but mastered the Graham system, in 1874 dashed off a note in Graham to Graham. For the rest of his life, Wilson kept improving his Graham to a degree where present historians almost wished for a shorthand Rosetta stone that would provide...
About the turn of the century, a popular song among Japanese students had a refrain that ran "dekansho, dekansho." It was shorthand for "Descartes, Kant, Schopenhauer." In the early 1950s, the hit refrain was "chiiku dansu" i.e., dancing "cheek to cheek." In symbolic miniature, the two songs reflect two staggering cultural encounters between Japan and the West. Clam-shut to the outside world for centuries, Japan was pried open by Commodore Matthew Perry in 1854 and avidly, if erratically, soaked up Western thought and technology. In 1945, the vanquished paid the victors the sincere, if at times embarrassing, flattery...
...Pasternak seems to be saying, is like the birth of a world, day emerging from night. The poet encompasses the world and suffers to express it ("Blood froze in the huge Colossus") while the common run of humanity sleeps under the snows. Such is Pasternak's own creative shorthand that -as with any major poet-the possibilities of symbolic interpretation are almost limitless, without ever offering complete certainty as to the "real" meaning. But an electric current of excitement runs through the poem, in which the meaning is sensed before it is understood...
...what Wessell called "the worst September for hiring in the last 15 years," the Personnel Office has had a constant list of about 100 jobs waiting to be filled. At least 30 of these are always for typists and shorthand experts...
...Ottawa was a slender magazine called Inuktitut (The Eskimo Way), a publication so thoroughly Eskimo that even the Department of Northern Affairs cannot fully translate its contents. Its 40 pages were written by Eskimos, illustrated by Eskimos, typed for engraving on a special typewriter with Eskimo characters, the strange shorthand symbols devised by 19th century Anglican missionaries to approximate the language. "Those writings like this," went Inuktitut's introduction, "they have a name: 'The Eskimo Way.' By the Eskimos only have they been written, and by the Eskimos will they generally be read." In Inuktitut, those writings...