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The text message, the rise of IM and Twitter have helped spawn a new argot of phrases shortened to acronyms or words transliterated to letter-number combinations (H8 for hate, 4 instance) or pictographs (<3 for love). In some ways it’s become a cant, but one influenced primarily by the nature of the delivery medium not by the clique developing and adopting it.

But its far from the first time this has happened. The telegraph was an innovation that, for its time, was as revolutionary as the Internet, and it gave rise to a clique that spoke a new language that was as modern as the discovery of electrical current that enabled the telegraph to work.

A whole new set of acronyms were developed, many of them shorthands that described the telegraphy process itself. There were jokes that arose from the way words appeared when they were converted to dots and dashes. There was power in being the first one who knew how the world changed day to day, and in being trusted to know everybody’s business, because you could send a secret telegram, but you had to tell the telegrapher.

Those who spoke this new electric language through their telegraph keys had a bond that elevated them in late 19th and early 20th century society, and many of them became the movers and shakers who would shape the rest of the 20th century, and at the rise of telegraphy nobody saw this coming.

We are in a period of great communications change.  On January 7, 2006, Western Union delivered its last telegram. What was once the paradigm of the important message became meaningless in a world awash in instantaneous worldwide data connectivity. In December of that year, the FCC dropped its requirement that amateur radio operators must pass a Morse Code proficiency exam.

Though we’re losing our legacy communications systems: newspapers dying, radio broadcasting its death rattle, there is tremendous comfort that even as we develop new systems we’re for the most part not making things up as we go along. We’ve been here B4.

CUL 73 CL