DAVID MURDOCK COLUMN: A code by any other name is still shorthand
So, the other day I was solo-Wafflin’ at the Fancy ‘long ‘bout noon, and … well, that doesn’t make much sense, does it? It makes perfect sense to me, but I have to explain half that sentence for it to make sense to most anyone else.
Two words in the sentence are simply shortened – “‘long” for “along” and “ ‘bout” for “about” – but they mark the beginning of a story in my particular dialect. People here would understand the phrasing as something like “Once upon a time …” – some indeterminate time in the past, but one that isn’t really all that important to the story.
Another word – “Wafflin’” – can be puzzled out from context. It means that I was eating at a Waffle House. At some point years ago, my friends and I ate at Waffle House so much that we shortened “Do you want to eat at Waffle House?” to “Wanna go Wafflin’?”
And “Fancy”? That’s a nickname some of my friends and I use for one of the four Waffle Houses in our county, the newest one. The first time we went to it, someone remarked, “Well, isn’t this fancy?” A nickname was born. All four have nicknames that refer to something that happened while we were eating there.
Friends have a language all their own. That just makes sense. All groups, in some way or the other, have similar “codes.” A shorthand for shared experience. Even that word “shorthand” is a type of code – not many people know what “shorthand” truly is anymore. Younger folks have no knowledge of the shorthand system people once learned to take dictation because it’s just not too common these days. I know one person who was trained to take shorthand using the Gregg system that was once so common.
However, everybody has some kind of shorthand.
Multiple shorthands, in fact. There are different terms that social scientists and linguists use to denote various types of “shorthands,” but they all boil down to a particularly efficient use of language by a group to denote concepts commonly used by those groups.
All professional groups have a shorthand of expression. All culture groups have one. All age groups have one. All friend groups. All family groups. And, all individuals have one. We all possess multiple shorthands depending on our membership in various groups.
Just using myself as an example. Teachers use a general jargon, and each subject matter has a specific one.
My culture group is “Northeast Alabama,” and I’ve become increasingly aware over the years of the unique way we express ourselves here.
My age group is commonly referred to as Generation X; we grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, and our cultural references and speech patterns reflect that time.
Family? Most families have shared in-jokes that simply do not make sense to someone outside the family – shared experiences that are understood without explanation.
And personal shorthands? That’s what kicked off this line of thinking. I commonly use a literal system of personal shorthand when annotating in book margins that would not make sense to anyone else. While doing so not long back, I looked at what I’d written. All of a sudden, it struck me that no one else knows exactly what a single exclamation mark means to me, much less triple exclamation marks.
For the record, a single exclamation mark in the margin means that I really liked the way a writer has phrased something – usually in a witty way – and triple exclamation marks means that I was really impressed with the idea the writer expressed. I almost never use double exclamation marks.
And sometimes, just to be honest, I make up words I use in annotations and journal entries. Someone reading my journal would be confused by some of the words I use. Eventually, a reader would puzzle out the definitions by context, but sometimes I make up words or borrow them from other sources to mean something specific.
An example of that in my journal is “fascinado,” which has no formal meaning in English. I think it means “fascinated” in Spanish, but I use it as a noun meaning “an object of fascination.” Even then, that’s only the denotation; the connotation of it is one of those subjects with which I am deeply fascinated. So much so, that I’ll read any article or book on the subject that comes my way.
Sometimes, those subjects are the most random things, things that even friends might not know fascinate me so deeply. Like the sailing frigate U.S.S. Constitution. Someone gave me a book on this ship when I was a child, and I’ve read about her quite a bit. Although I’ve never visited her in Boston, I keep up with any news about this historic ship.
I have many, many more random fascinados, seemingly strange things that caught my attention at some time or another. Obviously, the use of language is one, but sometimes it’s oddly specific. For example, I’m deeply fascinated by naming patterns and traditions, why we choose certain names for children. Names increase and decrease in popularity as time passes, and I’ve always been interested in the patterns, the “why” of them.
Considering that everyone has such shorthands, I sometimes wonder how we communicate at all.
David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. The opinions reflected are his own.
This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: DAVID MURDOCK COLUMN: A code by any other name is still shorthand
