Words and Stuff
The wedding season is upon us, bringing with it gasps of amazement from those who remember when a marriage was celebrated with little more than a glass of champagne and a chunk of cake. Yet today’s receptions, no matter how lavish, lack one element that used to be a fixture, the ritual reading of telegrams.
They seldom said anything surprising, but they brought greetings from distant places, and with more immediacy than a letter. That task could be done by e-mails, but these are hardly special, so not worth inflicting on inattentive guests.
Just as the internet has changed the use of English, so the electric telegraph changed the language in the 19th century. Most notably, it brought brevity. The sender of a cable had to pay by the word and charges were high. So telegrams had to be short.
Often this meant omitting some words and lengthening others. Journalists of my age will remember telegrams that began ‘Canst’ rather than ‘Can you’, went on to ‘soonest’, instead of ‘as soon as possible’ and ended ‘Bestest’, rather than ‘Best wishes’. Readers of The Oldie may also remember a letter in the February issue about the use of the prefix ‘-un’ in place of ‘no’. This was exemplified by an exchange between an editor and an idle foreign correspondent: ‘Why unnews?’ ‘Unnews good news.’ ‘Unnews unjob.’
Just as well known, and just as unlikely to be true, are the lines, saluting crisp cables: ‘“Peccavi”—i’ve Sind,/ Wrote Napier, so proud./ More briefly, Dalhousie/ Wrote “Vovi”—i’ve Oude.’
Sir Charles Napier was the British commander supposedly announcing the capture of Sindh in 1843. (In truth, the pun was suggested by Catherine Winkworth in a letter to Punch.)
The annexation of Oude when Lord Dalhousie was India’s Governor-general took place in 1856, but probably without such a pithy announcement. As for the unversed ‘Nunc fortunatus sum’, though attributed to Colin Campbell when he arrived in Lucknow in 1857, the message is more likely the work of a chuckling Latin master in England who had failed to notice that ‘I’m in Lucknow’ is shorter.
Concision wasn’t always funny. A little yellow envelope delivered in times of war often contained a telegram bearing the news, in brutal brevity, of a serviceman’s death. But a short message could somehow be funnier if it came by cable than if it had arrived as an e-mail. ‘Streets full of water. Please advise’ was Robert Benchley’s message to his editor at the New Yorker on arrival in Venice. It wouldn’t work as an e-mail.
Telegrams weren’t always short. A cable written in 1946 by George Kennan, the American chargé d’affaires in Moscow, prepared the ground for America’s cold-war policy of Soviet containment. It ran to 8,000 words, earning it the name ‘The Long Telegram’.
Typically, diplomatic cables were encrypted. Code writing was thus another consequence of telegraphy, and not just to keep secrets. Many companies, especially financial ones, developed codes simply to speed up their daily operations.
N M Rothschild was one of the first. By the 1870s, it had developed elaborate codes, many of which were published. In time, privacy and security became important, and every Rothschild agent in the world would have an individual code, in which a few digits might do the work of a whole sentence: ‘116’, for example, meant ‘We will effect shipment and insurance.’
Alas, companies no longer feel the need to be concise, allowing prolix businessmen to murder the language more painfully than almost any other group. Bring back the telegram?