The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Telegramese
Back to the future

First, to go back in time . . .

I know, I know—I said this was going to be about new things. But there’s just a little bit of history to begin with.

Many years ago (like more than 100), there were no such things as texts or e-mail or even the telephone. If you wanted to send someone far away a short message very fast, you had to put a letter in an empty bottle and throw it in the ocean . . .

Ha ha! Only joking. :-)

I’ll start that again. If you wanted to send someone far away a short message very fast electronically,you had to use something called a telegram. This was usually done at the post office. You would tell the person at the post office what you wanted to say and they would type it into a machine, which would send the message electronically to another post office anywhere in the world.

Now, in a telegram you paid for each word, so to save money you used as few words as possible. As a result, a very short way of saying things developed, known as telegramese. In some ways it was like the brief writing we use in mobile phone text messages today. Have a look at this telegram that the Word Snoop’s great-grandmother received on her 113th birthday, from her favorite grandson, Alyosha:

Just like in a text message, you can see that Alyosha tried to keep the message short by leaving out words he might have put in if he’d been writing a letter. You can also see that, unlike text messages, telegrams were printed in CAPITAL LETTERS, which meant it looked like you were SHOUTING, and the word STOP was used for a period. You could include other punctuation if you wanted to, but a single mark cost the same as a single word, so people rarely did.

Okay, so both telegrams and text messages are short, but the big difference between the two is that millions of texts are sent around the world every day, whereas telegrams were mainly kept for special occasions. This meant that unlike the ever-changing, ever-developing language of texting, telegramese remained pretty much the same.

It’s funny—even though nowadays with the Internet and mobile phones there’s no real need for telegrams anymore, people still seem to like them and you can still send a telegram from the post office if you want to.

Or a gorillagram if you really want to . . .

Singing telegrams

When telegrams began 100 years ago, they were mainly used to communicate bad news—that is, to say that someone was sick or had died. So when the telegram boy arrived at the door, most people thought “Uh-oh.” To encourage people to think of telegrams as happy things, singing telegrams were invented in the 1930s. A delivery boy would come to your door and sing a message, usually for someone’s birthday or a wedding.

It must have been quite hard sometimes. Try singing this telegram that Alyosha got back in reply from my great-grandmother: