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Telegram style

Telegram style, also known as telegraphese or telegraphic style, is a clipped form of writing that abbreviates words, omits function words like articles, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs, and packs maximum information into the minimum number of words to ensure clarity and brevity.^[1] This style emerged in the mid-19th century alongside the electric telegraph, the first practical system for long-distance instant communication developed by inventors such as Samuel Morse in the United States and Charles Wheatstone in the United Kingdom.^[2] The telegraph's pricing structure, which charged users per word transmitted over wire, directly drove the adoption of this economical writing approach, as senders sought to reduce expenses while conveying essential details unambiguously.^[3] Early systems, operational from the 1830s onward, imposed high tariffs—such as variable rates based on distance in the 1850s German-Austro Telegraph Union (around 0.0144 French francs per kilometer plus a fixed fee) or a uniform 3 French francs for messages over 45 miles by the 1865 International Telegraph Union—making verbosity costly and prompting the use of codes, abbreviations, and minimal syntax.^[3] By the late 19th century, international regulations standardized these practices, further embedding telegraphese in global communication, particularly for commercial, journalistic, and personal dispatches.^[3] A hallmark of the style was the substitution of words like "STOP" for punctuation to avoid ambiguity in Morse code transmission, as periods were difficult to distinguish in dots and dashes; for instance, a 1870s domestic telegram of 10 words might cost about $1.00, equivalent to a day's wages for many workers.^[4] Iconic examples include Orville Wright's 1903 telegram announcing the first powered airplane flight: "Success four flights Thursday morning all against twenty one mile wind started from Level with engine power alone average speed through air thirty one miles longest 57 seconds inform Press home Christmas," which exemplifies the omission of articles and connectors to fit vital facts into 32 words. Such messages often led to humorous misinterpretations if not crafted carefully, like the apocryphal "Mother-in-law dead stop" read as an urgent command. Though the telegraph declined with the rise of the telephone and internet—Western Union sending its last U.S. telegram in 2006—telegram style's legacy persists in modern concise formats like news headlines (headlinese), résumés, and even text messaging, where brevity remains valued for efficiency.^[5] Its influence extended to literature and journalism in the 19th century, shaping terse prose in periodicals and novels that mimicked the telegraph's urgent, fragmented discourse.^[6]

History and Origins

Antecedents in Early Communication

The antecedents of telegram style can be traced to 18th- and 19th-century semaphore systems, which relied on visual signals from towers to transmit messages over long distances, inherently limiting content to essential words due to the time required for each signal. These mechanical systems, such as those using pivoting arms or shutters visible through telescopes, allowed operators to relay information station by station, but the slow pace—often three signals per minute—necessitated brevity to minimize errors and delays in transmission. For instance, early semaphore networks employed around 200 symbols representing letters and pre-coded phrases, enabling concise encoding of complex ideas that would otherwise require lengthy descriptions.^[7]^[8] Naval signaling codes in the early 1800s further exemplified this emphasis on succinct communication, using flag-based systems to convey short phrases or commands across distances at sea, where verbose messaging was impractical due to visibility constraints and the need for rapid relay. These codes combined flag positions or colors to represent predefined signals, such as tactical orders or warnings, allowing ships to communicate efficiently without spelling out full sentences. This approach influenced later coded expressions by prioritizing brevity to ensure clarity in high-stakes environments, much like the economic pressures that would later shape telegraphic language.^[9] In parallel, 19th-century postal services imposed per-sheet or per-distance charges that encouraged writers to omit articles, prepositions, and redundant words to reduce costs and fit content within limited space. Before reforms like the U.S. Postal Act of 1845 and 1851, which lowered rates to a flat few cents per half-ounce letter, high fees—often calculated by the number of sheets or mileage—prompted techniques such as cross-writing, where correspondents wrote in multiple directions on a single page to maximize value. This practice fostered a habit of economical phrasing, prefiguring the per-word incentives of telegrams by training users to prioritize essential information over elaboration.^[10]^[11] A pivotal example is the 1790s French optical telegraph invented by Claude Chappe, which demanded ultra-concise phrasing to overcome signal relay delays across chains of towers spaced 10-20 kilometers apart. Chappe's system, operational from 1794 and expanded under Napoleon to over 500 stations, used semaphore arms to transmit symbols that operators relayed manually, with each full message taking hours but requiring minimal words to avoid prolonged exposure to weather or visibility issues. Messages were often coded or abbreviated at the source, ensuring swift propagation despite the mechanical limitations, and this network's success highlighted how transmission constraints could transform language toward essentialism.^[12]^[13]

Emergence in Telegraph Era

The electric telegraph, a pivotal innovation in rapid long-distance communication, was invented by Samuel F. B. Morse in 1837, utilizing electromagnetic pulses to transmit messages over wires.^[8] This system employed Morse code, a sequence of dots and dashes representing letters and numbers, enabling efficient signal transmission. The invention addressed longstanding limitations of earlier optical and mechanical signaling methods by allowing instantaneous messaging independent of visibility or weather conditions.^[14] The first commercial application of Morse's telegraph occurred on May 24, 1844, with the transmission of the biblical phrase "What hath God wrought" from the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., to Baltimore, Maryland, over a 40-mile line funded by Congress.^[15] This demonstration marked the beginning of practical deployment, as the line was soon extended for public and governmental use, facilitating real-time coordination during events like elections and emergencies. By the late 1840s, private companies began constructing extensive networks, transforming the technology from experimental to commercial infrastructure. In the 1850s, major telegraph operators, including the newly formed Western Union Telegraph Company in 1856, implemented per-word billing structures, charging fees based on message length—typically around 25 cents for the first 10 words domestically, with additional words incurring extra costs—which profoundly encouraged concise phrasing to minimize expenses.^[16] This economic model directly fostered the emergence of telegram style, as senders learned to eliminate superfluous elements for cost efficiency. Early operator guidelines emphasized omitting articles like "the," conjunctions such as "and," and auxiliary verbs including "is" or "are," a practice vividly illustrated in 1860s U.S. Civil War dispatches; for instance, Union generals' terse reports during battles often bypassed non-essential words to expedite transmission and reduce charges.^[17] Further standardization came through early international efforts, with the 1850 bilateral telegraph agreement between Prussia and Belgium establishing uniform tariffs and procedures for cross-border messages, including consistent word-count methods that harmonized rates and promoted brevity across European networks.^[18] These pacts, precursors to broader unions, ensured that international dispatches adhered to shared billing norms, influencing global telegram conventions by the mid-19th century. Building on such agreements, the West European Telegraph Union formalized similar standards in 1855, extending the practice of economical wording to multinational communications.^[18]

Core Elements of Telegram Style

Principles of Conciseness

Telegram style, often referred to as telegramese, fundamentally relies on the omission of function words—including articles (e.g., "the," "a"), conjunctions (e.g., "and," "but"), prepositions (e.g., "in," "to"), and auxiliary verbs (e.g., "is," "will")—while retaining content words such as nouns, main verbs, and adjectives to preserve core meaning.^[19]^[20] This selective elimination prioritizes brevity, allowing essential information to be conveyed with minimal words, as each word in a telegram incurred a cost based on distance and length.^[21] Key grammatical techniques in telegramese include subject omission or implication, where the subject is inferred from context rather than stated explicitly. For instance, "Arriving tomorrow" conveys "I am arriving tomorrow," relying on shared understanding to imply the subject.^[19]^[20] Verbs are typically reduced to their base or infinitive forms, avoiding tense markers or auxiliaries, which further shortens messages without sacrificing clarity in urgent communications.^[20] Punctuation in telegram style is handled sparingly to minimize character count: periods are often replaced by the word "STOP" to denote sentence ends, while commas, apostrophes, and other marks are entirely omitted, treating spaces as sufficient word separators.^[21] This practice, exemplified in phrases like "SEND MONEY STOP ARRIVE SOON," ensured efficient transmission over telegraph lines.^[21] The resulting telegramese grammar emphasizes imperatives and telegraphic verbs that imply obligation or direction, such as using "proceed" to mean "you should proceed," dominating the style to issue clear, action-oriented instructions.^[20] Overall, these principles create a subgrammar optimized for economy, where meaning emerges from context and lexical essentials rather than full syntactic structure.^[19]

Abbreviations and Coded Expressions

In telegram style, abbreviations and coded expressions served as essential tools for compressing messages, allowing senders to convey complex ideas with minimal words while adhering to per-word billing. These shorthand elements evolved from the need for efficiency in early electrical telegraphy, where operators and users developed standardized acronyms, prosigns, and phrasebooks to reduce transmission time and costs. Common abbreviations often drew from everyday language, while coded expressions relied on pre-agreed dictionaries that substituted arbitrary words or numbers for entire sentences, enhancing both brevity and confidentiality in commercial and personal communications.^[22] Among the most widespread abbreviations were those used by telegraph operators to facilitate rapid exchanges, particularly in professional contexts like railroads and long-distance conversations. For instance, "RUOK" stood for "are you okay?", enabling quick welfare checks, while "GA" signified "go ahead" to prompt the recipient to transmit or "good afternoon" as a greeting, depending on context. Numerical codes from the Phillips Code, a 19th-century system popularized among operators, included "73" for "best regards," a valediction that originated in the 1850s and persisted as a courteous sign-off. These abbreviations were documented in operator manuals, such as George M. Dodge's 1901 The Telegraph Instructor.^[22]^[23]^[24] Coded expressions extended this efficiency through specialized phrasebooks, known as telegraphic codes or cipher codes, which mapped innocuous words to lengthy phrases for secure and economical use. One prominent example was the ABC Telegraphic Code, first published in the 1870s and revised through the 1880s, which contained nearly 25,000 entries tailored for merchants and shipowners. In this system, the code word "Accept" corresponded to phrases like "I (we) will accept," allowing users to confirm business agreements in a single word rather than a full sentence. Similarly, Booraem's Commercial Code, used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, employed sequences like "MUSTARD GERANIUM PARIS RITZ SIXTEENTH" to mean "Detained unexpectedly. Will arrive Paris Ritz sixteenth," compressing travel updates that would otherwise span dozens of words. These codebooks were distributed globally to chambers of commerce and banks, with editions like the 1881 ABC code emphasizing commercial phrases.^[25]^[26] Industry-specific codes further customized telegram style for specialized fields, integrating domain jargon into abbreviated forms. In commercial trade, terms like "FOB" for "free on board" denoted delivery conditions at the seller's expense until loading, a standard abbreviation in international commerce that originated in 19th-century shipping contracts and was routinely used in telegrams to specify transaction terms without elaboration. Maritime telegrams adopted similar efficiencies, drawing from operator shorthand and international signal codes; for example, phrases in systems like the Phillips Code or ABC variants allowed captains to report positions or intentions succinctly, though specific acronyms varied by company. These sector-tailored expressions ensured precision in high-stakes environments, where clarity under word limits could prevent costly errors in navigation or deals. The use of abbreviations and coded expressions peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries but began declining after the 1920s as telephone networks expanded, offering real-time voice communication that eliminated the need for written compression in many personal and business interactions. Telegrams overall waned with cheaper long-distance calls, rendering elaborate codebooks obsolete for civilian use by the mid-20th century. However, these practices persisted in aviation and military sectors until the 1990s, where Morse code-based abbreviations remained vital for radio transmissions in remote operations, aircraft identification, and secure signaling, only fully supplanted by digital systems like satellite links.^[27]^[28]

Linguistic Variations

English-Language Features

In English-language telegram style, messages were crafted to maximize clarity while minimizing words, often omitting articles, prepositions, auxiliary verbs, and other non-essential elements to reduce costs charged per word. A prominent historical example is the 1912 distress signal from the RMS Titanic, transmitted as "We have struck an iceberg. SINKING FAST. Come to our assistance," which exemplifies the telegraphic omission of redundant words like "we are" before the key phrase, prioritizing urgency over grammatical completeness. This approach ensured rapid transmission across Anglo-American telegraph networks, where brevity was not merely stylistic but economically imperative. Standardization efforts in the late 19th century further shaped these features, particularly through guidelines issued by the British Post Office after it nationalized telegraph services in 1870. These rules emphasized minimal punctuation to avoid extra charges, permitting only full stops (periods) without additional cost in some cases, while other marks like commas or question marks were treated as full words; senders often substituted words like "STOP" for periods or omitted punctuation altogether to economize. Signatures were similarly handled: the sender's name was included as part of the chargeable message but could be omitted or abbreviated unless explicitly paid for as an addendum, reinforcing the style's focus on essential content over formalities. In the United States, the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), established in 1887 and granted oversight of telegraph rates by the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, enforced similar constraints; domestic telegrams under standard day rates carried a minimum charge equivalent to 10 words, compelling users to condense messages accordingly and standardizing the terse, noun-verb structure prevalent in English.^[29] The cultural impact of these English-specific conventions extended to literature, where telegram-style brevity influenced modernist writing techniques. Ernest Hemingway, drawing from his experience as a journalist filing cable dispatches—overseas reports limited by word-count fees—developed his "iceberg theory," which advocated omitting surface details to imply deeper meaning, as seen in early 20th-century short stories like those in In Our Time (1925); this mirrored telegraphic economy by stripping away articles and connectives to evoke emotion through implication rather than exposition.^[30] Such adaptations highlighted how English telegram style, rooted in practical Anglo-American telegraphy, fostered a linguistic precision that permeated broader artistic expression.

Adaptations in Other Languages

In French telegrams, adaptations were part of broader multilingual code systems under international regulations.^[9] German telegram style utilized official codebooks issued by the Deutsche Reichspost in the 1920s, incorporating phonetic codes to comply with international standards.^[9] These adaptations exploited the language's morphological flexibility. In Asian languages, telegram adaptations addressed the challenges of non-alphabetic scripts through script-specific abbreviations and numeric substitutions. Japanese imperial telegrams from the early 1900s relied on katakana for concise code words, typically two or three characters long, drawn from systems like the 1881 Keiben Hitsuyo Denshin Fucho Go and the 1899 Denshin Fugo, which used I-RO-HA ordering to abbreviate kanji-based phrases efficiently.^[31] Similarly, Chinese systems in the early 20th century employed four-digit numeric codes for each character, as standardized in the 1908 Ming mi Ma Dian bao Shu and refined in the 1929 Ming mi Dian ma Xin bian, allowing logographic transmission without phonetic intermediaries and covering thousands of characters for commercial and official use.^[32] The 1929 International Telegraph Regulations removed the prior requirement for pronounceable code words, facilitating adaptations for diverse languages including those with non-phonetic scripts.^[9] This adjustment, effective from the late 1920s onward, facilitated broader adoption of telegraphy in diverse linguistic contexts.

Comparisons and Modern Relevance

Similarities to Text Messaging

Telegram style and modern text messaging share fundamental techniques of brevity driven by practical constraints on message length and cost. In telegrams, users omitted unnecessary words, articles, and punctuation to minimize charges per word, a practice mirrored in SMS texting where the 160-character limit—established in the 1980s under GSM standards to fit within signaling protocols—prompted similar compressions to avoid extra messages or fees.^[33] This parallel fostered shared omissions, such as dropping vowels or function words, evident in 19th-century telegrams like "Hw r u ts mng?" (How are you this morning?) and early 1990s textspeak equivalents.^[34] The evolution of texting abbreviations directly draws from telegramese traditions developed in the telegraph era. As mobile SMS emerged in Europe during the early 1990s—building on 1980s GSM development—users adapted the elliptical style of telegrams, incorporating phonetic spellings and initialisms to convey full phrases efficiently.^[34] For instance, "C U L8R" (see you later) echoes the coded expressions of telegrams, where abbreviations like "PLS" for "please" or "TU" for "thank you" were standardized to pack information densely, much as modern acronyms like "BRB" (be right back) do today.^[34] This lineage highlights how telegraph operators' shorthand influenced the casual, resource-conscious language of digital messaging from its inception. Cultural continuity persists in contemporary apps, where telegraphic phrasing resurfaces under constraints like data limits or urgent scenarios, prioritizing essential information over full sentences to ensure quick transmission.^[34] Such practices underscore the enduring impact of telegram style on digital communication, adapting historical brevity to modern contexts without formal coding systems.

Differences from Other Concise Forms

Telegram style, driven by per-word pricing, prioritized absolute efficiency in conveying essential information, eschewing stylistic flourishes common in other concise formats.^[21] Unlike newspaper headlines, which often employ alliteration or puns to captivate readers and fit spatial constraints while adding rhetorical appeal—such as "Man Bites Dog" to highlight the unusual event—telegram messages stripped language to its barest form, rendering the same incident as "MAN BIT DOG" without any ornamental wordplay.^[35]^[36] This difference stems from headlines' journalistic role in enticing further reading versus telegrams' focus on unambiguous, cost-minimizing transmission.^[17] In contrast to email, telegram style demanded fully self-contained messages, as there were no threading, reply chains, or attachments to provide contextual cues or supplementary details.^[37] Emails, while also favoring brevity in subject lines and bodies, rely on integrated features like quoted replies and file enclosures to build ongoing dialogues without repeating prior information, allowing for less rigid compression.^[38] Telegrams' isolation from such supports forced every dispatch to stand alone, amplifying the need for explicit, non-reliant phrasing.^[17] Social media posts, such as those on Twitter (now X), impose character limits to enforce conciseness but permit "fluff" through free emojis and multimedia that convey nuance without additional word count, a liberty absent in telegrams' era of fixed per-word charges.^[21] For instance, post-2006 Twitter updates could incorporate emojis starting around 2014 to express tone economically, whereas telegrams banned such visual aids, substituting words like "STOP" for punctuation to avoid extra fees.^[37] This economic constraint in telegrams eliminated non-essential elements entirely, unlike social platforms where limits encourage creativity over pure austerity.^[17] While 21st-century microblogging retains telegram-like brevity in platforms such as Twitter, the addition of multimedia elements dilutes the intense textual compression of original telegram style, shifting emphasis from word-economy to multimodal expression.^[37] Tom Standage notes in The Victorian Internet that the telegraph's influence on modern digital communication persists in speed and succinctness, yet contemporary forms integrate visuals and interactions unavailable to 19th-century operators.^[39]

Practical Constraints

Impact of Message Length

The physical and regulatory limits on telegram length profoundly shaped the development of telegram style, encouraging users to prioritize brevity to minimize costs. In the United States before 1900, domestic telegrams were typically billed with a minimum charge equivalent to 10 words, with additional words incurring extra fees that deterred verbosity.^[40] This standard reflected the operational realities of telegraph companies like Western Union, where messages below the minimum were charged as the full unit, and exceeding it faced proportional surcharges, fostering a culture of concise expression essential to the style's core principles. Word measurement rules further reinforced these constraints, defining a "word" as any sequence of characters separated by spaces, with numbers—regardless of digit length—counted as a single word to standardize billing. For instance, a date like "1895" or a multi-digit sum such as "12345" was treated as one unit, allowing senders to pack numerical information efficiently without inflating the count. This system, rooted in 19th-century telegraph practices, incentivized the omission of unnecessary separators and the use of abbreviations, directly influencing stylistic choices like eliding articles and prepositions. For example, in military dispatches, a figure like "1000 troops" counted as two words, but spelling out numbers increased costs. To accommodate longer messages without prohibitive daytime rates, services like "night letters" emerged around 1910, permitting up to 50 words (or more) at half the standard cost, though delivery was deferred until the next morning.^[41] In the 1920s, overlength surcharges became particularly punitive, compelling users to refine their phrasing to extreme economy or opt for deferred options.^[40] Such penalties exemplified how length limits not only capped content but also drove innovations in coded language to convey complex ideas within fiscal boundaries. Global variations amplified these effects, particularly in imperial networks where distance escalated costs. In the 1890s British Empire, cables to India imposed high per-word rates calibrated for short dispatches across vast submarine lines, prompting even tighter adaptations in colonial communications.^[40] These constraints collectively transformed telegram style into a model of distilled precision, where every word bore the weight of potential expense, influencing usage patterns from personal notes to official directives.

Economic and Technical Factors

The economic constraints of telegraphy profoundly shaped the development of telegram style, as charges were levied per word, incentivizing brevity to minimize costs. In the mid-19th century United States, domestic telegram rates typically ranged from $0.35 to $1.00 per word for distances like New York to Philadelphia or Chicago, depending on the route and company, with transcontinental messages initially costing up to $1 per word in the early 1860s before dropping to the congressionally mandated 30 cents per word.^[42] By the 1950s, pricing had evolved into tiered systems offering discounts for longer messages, night rates, or bulk services; a standard 10-word domestic telegram from New York to Chicago cost $0.75, equating to about 7.5 cents per word, reflecting efficiencies from consolidation under Western Union.^[16] International cable rates, such as from New York to London, stood at around 20 cents per word in the late 1940s and remained comparable into the 1950s, though varying by destination and service type like full-rate versus deferred messages.^[42] Technical limitations of early telegraph infrastructure further enforced concise messaging. Morse code transmission relied on sequences of short (dit) and long (dah) pulses, where efficiency scaled with message length; longer words or sentences required more pulses and intervals, slowing overall throughput and increasing transmission time on shared lines. Early electromagnetic relays and manual operators handled only 20 to 40 words per minute, limiting capacity on circuits that often supported multiple users, thus prioritizing short, essential communications to avoid bottlenecks.^[43]^[44] Regulatory frameworks in the 1860s emphasized reliable transmission, indirectly promoting clarity in telegram style. The Pacific Telegraph Act of 1860 subsidized line construction but required operators to ensure accurate delivery, while company policies—enforced through contracts and upheld in courts—held telegraph firms not liable for errors in ambiguous, obscure, or coded messages unless explicitly guaranteed, effectively penalizing excessive brevity that risked misinterpretation by shifting responsibility to senders.^[45]^[46] The post-World War II era marked the decline of telegraphy due to competing technologies, rendering telegram style obsolete. Peak usage occurred in 1945 with over 236 million messages transmitted in the United States, but the expansion of affordable long-distance telephone lines—coupled with telex and fax—reduced volumes by more than 90% by the 1980s, when annual telegrams fell to around 10 million or fewer, eliminating the economic pressures that had sustained concise phrasing.^[47]^[16]

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First transcontinental telegraph - Wikipedia
The charge during the first week of operation was US$1 (equivalent to about $35 in 2024) per word, whereas the Telegraph Act of 1860 had specified 30 cents.Missing: introduction date
[45]
http://cprr.org/Museum/Pacific_Telegraph_Act_1860.html
[46]
How the Early Cable Was Used | American Experience - PBS
The initial rate in 1866 for messages sent along the transatlantic cable was ten dollars a word, with a ten word minimum, meaning that a skilled workman of the ...
[47]
The Pacific Telegraph Act (1860)
Oct 19, 2003 · "An Act to Facilitate Communication between the Atlantic and Pacific States by Electric Telegraph". Chapter 137, U.S. StatutesMissing: clarity | Show results with:clarity
[48]
[PDF] Liability of Telegraph Companies for Fraud, Accident, Delay and ...
-Cipher dispatches come within the rule as to obscure messages, and the only damages which can be received in an action for a breach of contract to transmit ...Missing: 1860s clarity
[49]
The Use of Telegraphy Peaks in the U.S. with the Transmission of ...
In 1945 use of telegraphy peaked in the United States with the transmission of "236,169,000,000" messages during that year, presumably because this was the ...