Shorthand

“ Some even, as on the stage and in the moving pictures, take occasional notes on their cuffs,—all this in an effort to make the one interviewed talk unrestrainedly.
76. Use of Shorthand.—A word may be said here concerning shorthand. Its use in interviewing and in general news reports should not be too much encouraged, even when [Pg 50] a man is entirely willing to have his exact words recorded. ”

“ Throughout the civilized world the systems employed are those of the leading authors of the 19th century; earlier systems have now a numerically small number of practitioners. Shorthand has become an almost indispensable qualification for the amanuensis, and practical stenographic ability is a necessary equipment of 'the typewriter operator. In professional and commercial offices, and more recently in the services, dictation to shorthand writers has become general. ”

“ Although very many women have come into the business and are quite acceptable for business work, and for various other forms of dictation, yet when it comes to long straining work like court work and reporting long speeches, they have not the physical strength. I should say that it would take about two years for a person who is well fitted as to temperament and structure of the hands to become an expert writer of shorthand. ”

“ Symbolical or pictorial signs, if sufficiently suggestive and not very numerous, may be effective; but the use of “arbitraries” is objectionable because they are so difficult to remember. In many shorthand books the student is recommended to form additional ones for himself, and so of course make his writing illegible to others. ”

“ Sir Isaac Pitman's Phonography by Alfred Pitman, in French and English, Paris, 1900; Anderson's Catechism of Shorthand; Anderson's Hist. of Shorthand; Anderson's Shorthand Systems; Annual Register, 1897, Chron. p. 141; Callendar's Manual of Cursive Shorthand; Christian Age, 23 Feb. 1887; Gibons's Bibliography of Shorthand; Harper's Monthly, lx. 192; Levy's Hist. of Shorthand; Men and Women of the Time, 1895; Rockwell's Shorthand Instruction and Practice (Washington, 1893) ; Shorthand, a magazine; Transactions of the International Shorthand Congress, 1887 ”

“ All the way along there has been a decided blank space between decision in the mind and embodiment in language.
Whether slang, profanity, or colloquialisms have cut into our ordinary speech to such an extent as to keep us at a loss for the apt word, or whether we have grown careless or slovenly in our habits of expression, is a matter with which we are not concerned here. We do know that we are continually hampered by our inability to state absolutely our meaning. ”

“ We may excuse faulty attire, forgive the social slips of those who have forgotten from their little book on etiquette—in a word, we can overlook almost all shortcomings and errors of conduct save those only of speech. There is something in a man’s words that marks him with the mark of Cain or puts the halo around his brow. Yet, what a curious thing is language? Words are the least part of it. Their aptness, inflections, tones, pronunciations, stresses, and combinations—their parallelisms and contrasts—all these are immeasurably greater than the mere words themselves. ”

“ Having pointed out the importance of correct grammar and the right choice of language, I wish now to furnish you with some practical suggestions for the construction of sentences. Remember that a good thought often suffers from a weak and faulty expression of it.
Your sentences will certainly shape themselves after the structure of your own mind. If your thoughts are vivid and definite, so will be your language; if dreamy and hazy, so will your composition be obscure. Your speech, whether oral or written, can be but the expression of yourself; and what you are, that speech will be. ”

“ Another day I shall want to know what you mean by calling the verses Present Tense, Past Tense, and Future Tense—why you have just six of your words in each tense,—and whether other verbs can be conjugated in the same way.”
“I can answer at once that they can, my lord,” said Dr. Verb. “Indeed, very few verbs change as much as the verb to be, so that they are all easier to conjugate; as, I have, thou hast, he has; we have, you have, they have. I live, thou livest, he lives; we live, you live, they live.” ”

“ Pupils sometimes ask whether they should use long sentences or short sentences. This question is really answered in the preceding paragraph, for a simple sentence is usually shorter than a complex or a compound sentence. The fact is that what we like is variety. Until you are more experienced in composition, it will be well for you, in general, to use comparatively short sentences,—that is, sentences of not more than twenty-five or thirty words. ”

“ Humbler people yielded through fear of offence; and the practice extended, in time, to all ranks of society: so that at present the customary mode of familiar as well as complimentary address, is altogether plural; both the verb and the pronoun being used in that form. [237] This practice, which confounds one of the most important distinctions of the language, affords a striking instance of the power of fashion. It has made propriety itself seem improper. But shall it be allowed, in the present state of things, to confound our conjugations and overturn our grammar? ”

“ And when you have experienced this warcry 'what? what?' oftener than you like, you will raise the standard of your pronunciation (just [pg 40] as you would raise your voice to a deaf listener) merely to save yourself trouble, even though you were insensible to the shame of the affront.
In asseveration.
And this more careful articulation obtains also in all asseveration. A speaker who wishes to provoke attention to any particular statement or sentiment will speak the words by which he would convey it more slowly and with more careful articulation than the rest of his utterance. ”

“ Such an attack might only make the word conspicuous and so defeat the aim of true emphasis. True emphasis is the art of voicing the words in a phrase so that they shall assume a right relation to one another and, so related, best suggest the thought of which they are the symbols. I do not emphasize one word in a phrase and not the others. I simply vary my stress upon each word, in order to gain the proper perspective for the whole sentence. Just so, in a picture, I make one object stand out, and others fall into the background, by drawing or painting them in proper relation to one another. ”

“ Its vaunted gains, when we come to look closely at them, disappear. And now for its losses. There are in every language a vast number of words, which the ear does not distinguish from one another, but which are at once distinguishable to the eye by the spelling. ”

“ If the word "lie" be given immediately after the pronoun with the same intensity of feeling, the voice discretely descends from the high pitch heard at the end of the utterance of the pronoun, and in uttering the next concrete, again ascends through an interval, of less or more extent according to the emphasis which is imparted to it.
Again, in speech of sorrow, murmuring, piteous complaint, and the like, concrete intervals of less extent than those used in ordinary discourse are often heard. ”

“ The method of shortening which makes a simple part serve the purpose of a prolix whole tends toward the increased power of a tongue. Certain things are assumed to be understood; the processes of expression are simplified without embarrassment to those of the understanding. Then in the course of time, as it often happens, the process of abridgment alters the entire meaning for better or worse. ”

“ This grammatical liberty, though it is a common convenience Omission of relative pronounin conversation and has therefore its proper place in good writing, is apt to confuse the parts of speech, and to reduce a normal sequence of words to mere jargon. Writers who carelessly rely on their elliptical speech-forms to govern the elaborate sentences of their literary composition little know what a conscious effort of interpretation they often impose on their readers. ”

“ The meaning of voice-changes is understood by children long before the meaning of marks of punctuation is understood; while the full value of marks is rarely understood, even by educated and cultured people.
9
In spoken language the meaning of No. 3 is expressed by a continuous reading with neither pause nor voice-inflection within the sentence. The reading of No. 3-1, in order to convey its meaning to another person, requires quite a different voice process, which may be represented diagrammatically:
3-2. ”

“ Amply provided with nouns of all sorts, my methods of putting them together in trains of speech are as primitive as the French way of shunting freight cars with an elderly horse. It was on the sidings of Cherbourg that I invented my trick to avoid the embarrassment of genders—always use all nouns in the plural and without qualifying adjectives. Do not say, for instance, I love this old church, for then you've got to know whether "church" is male or female. Say rather One loves churches. ”

“ Those who have made the progress of languages their study, will observe, it is presumed, that the broad sounds of vowels change to the slender, [12] the difficult consonants to the easier, and the long vowels to short ones. This, it is imagined, will be found to be true in all languages, as well as our own; and such alteration seems founded in the nature of man and of society. The next object to understanding a language being dispatch, it is no wonder that short sounds have been encroaching on us, and depriving us of the tune of our words for the sake of gaining time. ”

“ And the pronoun, the adjective, the adverb and the preposition, however they may be disjunctively employed in certain cases, are chiefly useful as furnishing materials to the speaker, to be worked up into the complicated texture of the verb and the substantive. Nothing, in fact, can be more unlike, than the language, viewed in its original, elementary state,—in a vocabulary, for instance, of its primitive words, so far as such a vocabulary can now be formed, and the same language as heard under its oral, amalgamated form. ”

“ OBS. 13.—In respect to the second person singular, the grammar of Lindley Murray makes no distinction between the solemn and the familiar style; recognizes in no way the fashionable substitution of you for thou; and, so far as I perceive, takes it for granted, that every one who pretends to speak or write grammatically, must always, in addressing an individual, employ the singular pronoun, and inflect the verb with st or est, except in the imperative mood and the subjunctive present. ”

“ The Termination of the Infinitive Mood Present Tense, of the Verb Active, in regular Verbs, is always the same as the first Person of the Indicative Mood Present Tense singular; as to love, I love.
The Termination of the second Person Singular is formed out of the first by adding st or est; as I love, thou lovest; I read, thou readest.
The Termination of the third Person singular is formed out of the first by adding th or eth; as I love, he loveth, I read, he readeth; or only by adding s; as he loves, he reads. ”

“ Words have not only degenerated in sense; their outward form has also suffered. One principle—contraction—has affected both the pronunciation and spelling of many words. It may be taken as a general rule that words, as they grow older, become softer and shorter. They seldom expand, but almost always contract. This probably originated in a loose careless way of speaking, which afterwards affected the written language. ”

“ The following admirable observations on emphasis are worthy of attention.
“In every sentence, and clause of a sentence, there is one or more words which require to be pronounced with a greater degree of force than the other words. Without knowing and marking the accented syllables in words, we cannot give them their proper pronunciation; nor can we bring out the full meaning of a sentence, unless we know and mark the emphatic words. The accented syllables of words we learn by imitating the pronunciation of correct speakers ”

“ So, then, we are asking what is the condition of a man who has learned the dictionary standard?
(1) In common talk if we speak so indistinctly as not to be understood, we repeat our sentence with a more careful articulation. As Sweet used to say, the only security against the decay of language through careless articulation into absolute unintelligibility is the personal inconvenience of having to repeat your words when you are indistinctly heard. 'What' leaps out from the dictionary with a shout to the rescue of all his fellows. ”

“ Since a proposition should be announced in as few words as can be used, without sacrificing brevity to clearness, short sentences serve best for this purpose. As changes in the direction of the development of a thought should be quickly indicated, a short sentence is generally used for transition. And as at times when the mind is under a stress of strong feeling, or the action of a story is rapid, all explanatory matters are cut away, the barest statements in shortest sentences serve best to express strong emotion and rapid action. ”

“ CHAPTER VI VERBS § 72. The MHG. verb has the following independent forms:—one voice (active) , two numbers, three persons, two tenses (present and preterite) , two complete moods (indicative and subjunctive, the latter originally the optative) , besides an imperative which is only used in the present tense; two verbal nouns (the present infinitive, and the gerund, generally called the inflected infinitive) , a present participle with active meaning, and one verbal adjective (the past participle) . ”