We never tire of hearing that new things are really old, so it was especially pleasing to come across, in a “distillation” of his previous compilations, Schott’s Quintessential Miscellany by Ben Schott (Bloomsbury, £ 12.99), a list of words used in telegrams as abbreviations of longer phrases, to save money with the carriers. The nineteenth-century equivalents of the tweeter’s “LOL” or “IMHO” seem unnervingly precise. If a message read “Titmouse, but Amphimacer”, the bearer of The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code (1891) would swiftly deduce that she was being told, “I accept with pleasure your invitation for the theatre tomorrow evening, but you must send my allowance immediately”. The other selections read like notes for a Victorian melodrama, including “Roselite”: “resistance is useless”; “Emication”: “the epidemic has broken out again”; and “Evidential”: “a gunpowder explosion has occurred”.
Για να χρησιμεύσει ως στοιχείο στο φάκελο «Γκρίκλις».
TLS, 17 Ιουνίου 2011, σ. 32
Για να χρησιμεύσει ως στοιχείο στο φάκελο «Γκρίκλις».
TLS, 17 Ιουνίου 2011, σ. 32