a blog post tribute to the telegram

it is fas­ci­nat­ing to think back to the days when there was no inter­net and a lot of com­mu­ni­ca­tion took place via telegrams STOP and so I have decided to write this blog post in the style of a telegram from yes­ter­year COLON with­out punc­tu­a­tion STOP you may have already noticed just how hard it is to read a piece of writ­ing COMMA or any­thing for that mat­ter COMMA when there is no punc­tu­a­tion STOP it is kind of like lis­ten­ing to a per­son talk­ing in a mono­syl­labic style EN DASH is any­one else read­ing this in a stephen hawk­ing voice or is it just me QUESTION MARK any­ways I won­der what the old timey peo­ple would have thought of a word like any­ways being in a telegram ELLIPSIS FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT they prob­a­bly would have thought it was just a typo or as they would have called it a QUOTE MARKS typo­graph­i­cal error END QUOTE MARKS AND STOP yes COMMA indeed COMMA telegrams sure would have made peo­ples APOSTROPHE NO WAIT DOESNT THE APOSTROPHE GO AT THE END IF THE WORD AFTER IT IS POSSESSED BY SOMETHING PLURAL LIKE PEOPLE NO WAIT SORRY I GOT IT WRONG THE APOSTROPHE GOES AFTER THE S OF PEOPLES AND BEFORE WE GET TO LIVES SORRY CARRY ON AS YOU WERE lives eas­ier but they would have been painful to read all the time STOP wow EXCLAMATION MARK is any­one still read­ing this after all that QUESTION MARK per­son­ally I think I’m done with this telegram style of punc­tu­a­tion STOP I am not really a fan of read­ing text with­out para­graphs HASHTAG first­world­prob­lems STOP over and out STOP andrew KISS AND HUG



6 Comments

And now I need an aspirin STOP

Gil

What’s inter­est­ing when you com­pare telegrams and twit­ter is that both, for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, demand an eco­nom­i­cal use of lan­guage — Twit­ter because it has a fixed 140 char­ac­ter limit and telegrams because you pay by letter.

I sus­pect that if you com­pared tweets and telegrams side by side you’d find that while the actual syn­tax and spellings are very dif­fer­ent, there would be a lot of com­mon ground in terms of eco­nom­i­cal lan­guage and when/how the economies are made.

jojo

SMILEY FACE

omg EXCLAMATION MARK EXCLAMATION MARK EXCLAMATION MARK ONE i must con­fess i got a lit­tle lost COMMA but i am glad you did STOP

Letter Examples

Ien­joye­dreadin­git! It strained my eyes though.Good post.

thank you gil. found a the­sis topic!