The word snoop - Ursula Dubosarsky 2009

Shorthand
How it all began

Shorthand? What’s that?

I can tell you one thing, you don’t need a short hand to write it, but it sure takes a short time!

Have a look at this:

You might think this is just a lot of crazy squiggles that mean nothing at all. But actually it’s not. Shorthand is not really an alphabet, but a special way of writing with symbols so that you can put down on paper very, very quickly what people are saying out loud. You can write with shorthand far more quickly than if you tried to write something down the ordinary way.

There are thousands of different shorthand systems, going right back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. The most famous is probably one called Pitman, invented by Englishman Sir Isaac Pitman in 1837. Usually journalists or court reporters use shorthand, so we can have a record of what people said. Nowadays there are computers with special keyboards so that you can type shorthand, which is even faster than writing it.

But shorthand has also been used as a way of writing secrets. Way back in the sixteenth century, Englishman Timothy Bright published a guide to his own shorthand, called An Arte of Shorte, Swifte and Secrete Writing by Character. (Sounds good for us Word Snoops, doesn’t it?) And one of the most remarkable diary-keepers in all history, Englishman Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peeps), wrote 3,000 pages of his diary in such a particular shorthand that when he died no one could understand it. It took a lot of people over a hundred years to finally “translate” it back into English.

So if you knew shorthand, you could keep your own diary and write all sorts of secret messages with it. Like the squiggles on page 18—if you don’t know shorthand, it could mean anything. I’ll give you a hint, though. The cat sat on . . . Okay, okay, you guessed it!

Psst, Word Snoops! Remember how I mentioned a secret message at the start of this book? Well, here’s the first part. But you’ll have to crack the special code if you want to know what I’m saying. (Hint: Think about the alphabet, backward and forward . . .)