Excited to see a page of shorthand on LinkedIn, by my former FT colleague Andrew Hill. But when I stared closely at the specimen I found myself puzzled.
It certainly resembled the system that I used, Teeline. But it also didn’t make sense to me.
To my eyes, the last two words (shapes, items) on line eight seemed to say “down side”, and the first word on line nine “which”.
BUT… now that I think about it the same symbols on line eight could mean “twin set”, and “work”.
There’s a fair bit of mind-reading going on when I try to decipher this.
I’m thinking, “Does an FT man like Andrew seem more likely to write something containing the words ‘down side which’, or ‘twin set work’? And what the heck does the rest of it mean?”
Was it, in fact, NOT Teeline?
Could it be Pitmans, which my mother learned when she was young, so she could get work as a secretarial typist? I could never make sense of Mum’s shorthand, and she couldn’t read mine either – though at a glance our scribbles looked much the same.
The basic principle was to drop vowels (most of the time) and to use short strokes instead of elaborate letter shapes. A bit like this:
“-“ (above the line) is a T.
“_” (on the line) is a D.
“|” is the letter P.
“.” is S.
And so on.
Those three items in Andrew’s shorthand that I picked out looked like DWN SD WCH, but could also have been TWN ST WC.
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Ah, what a splendid mystery.
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I taught myself shorthand after university, before training as a journalist. I would watch the TV news and try to keep up with the newsreaders – impossible, until it wasn’t.
I loved doing shorthand, and felt pretty smug about it because I was jolly fast – if not as fast as some who have commented on Andrew’s post.
Mind you, I didn’t have to use it in other languages, as Andrew did.
PS. I’m not reading Andrew’s article online. Doesn’t seem right. I’ll wait till I can buy the physical paper at the weekend. If you have any sense you’ll do the same.