IN every age since written language began, rhetorical forms have been to a considerable extent influenced by the writing materials and implements which were available for man’s use. This is a familiar observation in studies of the past. Is it not, then, time that somebody inquired into the effects upon the form and substance of our present-day language of the veritable maze of devices which have come into widely extended use in recent years, such as the typewriter, with its invitation to the dictation practice; shorthand, and, most important of all, the telegraph ? Certainly these agencies of expression cannot be without their marked and significant influences upon English style.
Were the effects of these appliances limited to the persons actually using them such an inquiry would not be worth making. Commemoration odes will never be composed by dictation, — Paradise Lost to the contrary,— nor will the great pulpit orator prepare his anniversary sermons, having in view their transmission by submarine cable. However generally modern novelists and playwrights may avail themselves of the assistance of a stenographer, it seems certain that the saner and nobler literature of the world will always be written in more deliberate, and perhaps old-fashioned ways, by mechanical methods in which there has been little change from Chaucer to Kipling.
But, unfortunately, no man writes to himself alone. The makers of the popular vocabulary decree to a great extent the words which the recluse of the cloister must select. If the typewriter and the telegraph, for mechanical reasons purely, are encouraging certain words, certain arrangements of phrases, and a different dependence on punctuation, such an influence is a stone whose ripples, once set in motion, wash every shore of the sea of literature. Every rhetorician hastens to acknowledge that the most he can hope to do by his art is to reflect the best usage of the day, of which he is little more than an observer.
Granting, then, that the only effects of these mechanical agencies worth noticing come from their reflex relation to popular habits of expression, I purpose to trace some of the influences which the telegraph exercises in the choice of words and in rhetorical forms. A similar study of the various schemes of abbreviated writing derives an added importance from the fact that a universal shorthand has long been one of the dreams of orthographic reformers. While the immediate realization of this need not be feared, who can safely assert that some system may not suddenly be flashed before the public so simple and complete as to compel the attention of an utilitarian age ? The effects upon literary style of all existing shorthands permit of accurate analysis. I shall also advert to some of the effects of the dictation habit which the typewriting machines have brought into vogue, to the inevitable failure of the graphophone as an agency of composition; and, incidently, chiefly as an illustration of how mechanical trifles are modifying modern English, I shall allude to some of the not inconsiderable effects of the newspaper headline.
Let us turn to shorthand first, because it is a possible agency of composition, rather than of transmission. For purposes of illustration, take the Phillips Code, which is the shorthand of the telegraphers:—
ak acknowledge
akd acknowledged
akg acknowledging
akm acknowledgment
iw it was
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