Language Acquisition Pranks

People have told me I'd make a good father, and the greater part of me is sincerely flattered. The other part of me, though—the part that would read a Finnish grammar straight through—doesn't quite believe it. A child is a miracle, a focus and giver of affection, a vulnerable but autonomous being, and I agree. But to the inquiring mind, one's child is also a linguistic test subject, minus all that ethical and institutional red tape. Now that's a miracle.

Now in real life, my own child would have to be adopted, and would be raised in an English-speaking culture. Even if I went off the deep end and tried to teach them Backwards Greenlandic, someone would probably stop me from yelling "Qaugnnaignulaan!" at my bewildered three-year-old. For the following scenarios, let's imagine I've married an eccentric billionaire and moved to Siberia with our three children, each adopted at the time of birth. Even the people who do live in Siberia don't talk to us much, as we've weirded them out by doing whatever gay American billionaires do in Siberia.

The Line; or, How I Understand My Body

When I took a printmaking class last fall, I was obsessed with line. Shape, color, and texture were certainly interesting from a craft standpoint, but it was always the lines I reacted to viscerally. They seemed to possess character, gesture, personality, life.

A solid shape on paper, my instinct told me, depicts a physical thing, maybe even a living thing. Say, an elephant. But I couldn’t make myself instantly perceive that an elephant-shape represented aliveness. Unconsciously, I recognized the shape of an elephant, but it took some effort to interpret the elephant-shape as alive because I know an elephant should be alive. Only then did the elephant’s pose become meaningful. As the function of a living, nerve-lined body, it became a gesture rather than a shape.

Boyd's Syllabic Shorthand

Published 1903

If Ontario native Robert Boyd had wielded a sword along with his pen, he might have attempted a revolution. He claimed his breakthrough method could be learned in one-fifth the time of the old systems, the proponents of which he accused of being "unscrupulous" and "evil," of following a crooked course and "enslaving the innocent." Followers of his system, meanwhile, "are the safeguard of truth and righteousness, and upon them we depend for the stability of our civilization." Shorthand is serious shit, people. Cross this guy's path with your bourgeois attitude and you'll find yourself short a hand.

Why "Streptography"?

This blog contains two types of entries: examinations of shorthand systems and personal musings. The audience for either of these, I imagine, is small, and smaller still the overlap. But there is something of myself I see in the minds of shorthand inventors, and indeed in the systems themselves, so that I can't help but combine the two.

The name "Streptography" is not actually a word--I made it up. And while it might sound hilariously pretentious, it comes from a tradition among shorthand systems to bear names like Tachygraphy (swift writing), Brachygraphy (short writing), Semography (sign writing), Alethography (true writing), and Pantagraphy (all-writing), which admittedly are also hilariously pretentious.