Word frequency in shorthand

[igenlode]

While obediently learning my General Contractions (now up to paragraph 188 of 200 in Pitman's Shorthand Instructor!) in order to be able to do the exercises, I can't help asking myself if the language can really have changed that much since this textbook was published in 1913: was there ever a time when shorthand writers truly, desperately needed to write 'constitutional', 'ironmonger', 'bondsman' or 'dethronement' on a daily basis, such that words like these were provided with dedicated short forms as part of Pitman's shorthand scheme?

Some of the weirder inclusions make sense when you realise that a significant proportion of shorthand usage in the Victorian era consisted of taking down sermon texts -- either while their author was in the throes of composition or as a record after they were preached -- and the utility of including common words like 'there', 'over', 'happen', 'must', etc. is obvious. But I honestly cannot see why anyone would ever take the trouble to fill the necessarily limited list of General Contractions with obscurities like 'minstrel' when they could instead have provided shortcuts for words such as 'obvious'...

Comments

[pedanther]

One possibility that comes to mind is that the word choices are based on a survey of actual sermons to see what words came up frequently, which would then be subject to the vocabulary whims of the sermons' author(s). (Particularly if they used only one author's sermons.)

Have you ever read a novel called The Shakespeare Thief? It's about a boy in Elizabethan England who was taught shorthand so he could record sermons, who is then hired by an unscrupulous theatre producer to help bootleg Shakespeare's plays.