I am not all in the Twitter
By BILL DUNCAN When I was in college studying journalism, I decided to take a course to learn shorthand, thinking this would give me an edge on the competition. After two weeks of my struggling with the Gregg’s Shorthand manual, the instructor, a stern-faced woman, came to me with an ultimatum. Improve my penmanship or get out of her class. I got out of her class and over the years developed my own shorthand to quickly take notes. It required that I shorten words, but still to leave me enough information to transcribe my notes accurately. Of course it was not the same as the method of shorthand writing developed by Irish-born educator John Robert Gregg. His phonetic system became the method of choice in the United States and despite today’s electronic marvels is still largely used today by secretaries whose symbols passed the proficient test. Can I claim taking notes at 282 words a minute with 99.29 percent accuracy using my shorthand method? Certainly not. That was the rate of the winner of a championship contest using the Gregg shorthand system. I was born sixty years too soon. When I was given the ultimatum to clean up my penmanship no one envisioned computers and word processors. That was years before text messaging reduced the English language to compound abbreviated sentences like LOL, lots of luck or laughing out loud. There is an actual dictionary in print with over one thousand of this letter grunts used by text messengers. And, it is constantly being updated. I briefly thought about writing this entire column in text messaging abbreviations, but I would have had to attach the dictionary to make sure the reader would understand what I meant if I said ISFLATM in my column. Translation: I Sure Feel Like A Turquoise Monkey. Besides that, my on-line dictionary of text messaging was last updated on May 21, 2009 and at that time had 1,125 entries. No need to worry though, in this era of overnight obsolesce text messaging is now passé. Twittering is in and we have further reduced the language to grunts. A twitter has a limit of 140 words per twitter. Being curious, I tried to get with it and to discover twittering, but the only twitters that showed up on my e-mail were so inane I scrapped the whole idea. I honestly don’t need to know that a person had a donut with their coffee this morning. It is said that twittering helps humanize celebrities because like normal people they have coffee with their donut in the morning. New York Times columnist David Pogue offered some advice to Twittering beginners: “I’ll admit that for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs another ego-massaging, social networking time drain? Between e-mail, blogs and Facebook, who on earth has the time to keep interrupting the day to visit a web site and type in, ‘I’m now having lunch?’ And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?” I don’t know about you, but I don’t. Therefore I have found the delete button, a magic button that brings you back into reality. There is also another important device on the computer. It is called: Empty the trash. I have no idea where the trash goes and I am told by computer gurus it never fully goes away, but at least those inane messages go away from my computer screen. The best advice I have is that if you don’t have something to say, say nothing. I would just as soon not to be tweeted. (Bill Duncan can be reached the old fashion way, by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)
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