I'm always interested in jargons, cants, patois(es?) and codes, and recently learned that my father-in-law, a career newsman, didn't just have a problem with his throat this whole time, but rather has been communicating with me and in Cablese (and movie references). I knew it wasn't that he
Taylor Jones has an interesting blog post about Cablese, a code used by journalists and telegraph operators.
Converting a story written in regular old English to Morse code was time consuming, expensive, and crucially, charged by the word. And you couldn't just stick words together, like say joining phrasal verbs like WRITEUP for "write up." That's obviously two words smushed together to get around being charged by the word. However, you could get away with making a new word like UPWRITE. Newsmen developed a complex system they used on the cables ("Cablese") as well as their own codes for the news wire ("wirespeak") and each news agency also had their own secret codes (so they couldn't get scooped). Even though they don't use the telegraph anymore, Cablese and Wirespeak live on. [...]
There is an apocryphal story that an international correspondent quit their job with the cable:
It references another blog post:
Assume it is the 1950s, and two guys in white shirts, ties undone, cigarettes dangling from lips, are in United Press International bureaus, one in Tokyo, one in New York, communicating with each other. The teletype machine in Tokyo sounds three bells and these words clack out:
“SOS ETWIFE HEADS TOKYOWARD SMORNING SANSTOP. MUCHLY APC EYEBALL ARRIVAL. URGENTEST NEED THUMBSUCKER CUM ART.”
These were marching orders from headquarters to the fellow in Tokyo.
Tokyo sighs and replies with a word: “ONWORKING.”
Years ago, this imaginary exchange might have been plausible. It is written in vanishing languages—partly “cablese,” partly the Phillips Code, which itself was a shorthand version of the Morse Code, and partly in “wirespeak,” the jargon that Associated Press and its erstwhile strongest competitor in those days, United Press, independently devised for internal communications. Its purpose was to save time—and money.
The idea behind wirespeak was to condense words so that one stood for several. Thus “Tokyoward” meant “to Tokyo,” “smorning” meant “this morning,” “sansstop” meant “nonstop,” “eyeball arrival” meant “be on hand to witness the arrival of the secretary of state and his wife.”
And “onworking” meant “Okay, I’ll get to work on the news analysis (that’s the ‘thumbsucker’) you’re demanding.” “Cum art” meant have a photographer at the airport too.
Also relevant is Wired Love: A Romance of Dots and Dashes by Ella Cheever Thayer, a book from 1880 about two people who fall in love via telegraph line, which also contains some slang of the era and worries that will be familiar to online dating. The book is out of copyright and can be read online at Project Gutenberg.
