You could probably get Prunkle across by insisting it to be a person's name, but the context might belie that.
The point of restricting messages to known words was, the unit by which charges for a message were built up was the length of the message. The most common senders, though, were businesses, which would have a relatively fixed set of messages to send -- buy (this much) of (that), sell (this much) of (that), deliver (this much) of (that) to (there), and so on. Rather than the expense of, say, SHIP 45000 BOXES 2B CRAYON PENCILS UTICA they'd abbreviate it as far as possible, eg, S45T2BCPUCNY.
They do lose revenue from sending the shorter message, but also, the 12-letter message above is harder to send and receive, taking more time to send accurately, than the longer one might. Ordinary language has a lot of redundancy and error-protection in it allowing for better speed and accuracy -- make one mistake or miss two letters in `CRAYON PENCILS' and your message is still obvious; make one in `CP' and you might be selling anything, and if you miss two you've got nothing. And if they do make a mistake, the sender might sue them for the defective transmission!
So by trying to limit things to a known language, the hope was that they could enjoy higher rates and simpler messages. But then uses began digging out obscure words and laying meaning on them, so that, say, `XEROTIC 45' might mean the whole thing above, losing the semantic double-check.
Telegraph companies tried a little while longer to keep things to common words, or to Standard Codebooks, but eventually gave up on trying to keep messages understandable.
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rosecarmine
(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-25 04:06 am (UTC)You could probably get Prunkle across by insisting it to be a person's name, but the context might belie that.
The point of restricting messages to known words was, the unit by which charges for a message were built up was the length of the message. The most common senders, though, were businesses, which would have a relatively fixed set of messages to send -- buy (this much) of (that), sell (this much) of (that), deliver (this much) of (that) to (there), and so on. Rather than the expense of, say,
SHIP 45000 BOXES 2B CRAYON PENCILS UTICAthey'd abbreviate it as far as possible, eg,S45T2BCPUCNY.They do lose revenue from sending the shorter message, but also, the 12-letter message above is harder to send and receive, taking more time to send accurately, than the longer one might. Ordinary language has a lot of redundancy and error-protection in it allowing for better speed and accuracy -- make one mistake or miss two letters in `
CRAYON PENCILS' and your message is still obvious; make one in `CP' and you might be selling anything, and if you miss two you've got nothing. And if they do make a mistake, the sender might sue them for the defective transmission!So by trying to limit things to a known language, the hope was that they could enjoy higher rates and simpler messages. But then uses began digging out obscure words and laying meaning on them, so that, say, `
XEROTIC 45' might mean the whole thing above, losing the semantic double-check.Telegraph companies tried a little while longer to keep things to common words, or to Standard Codebooks, but eventually gave up on trying to keep messages understandable.