Since August I've been designing a written shorthand for English (more on which here). This is a design problem, and the artifact is the system itself: the set of rules that make certain written signs meaningful. The practitioner has to balance the attributes of the system by making a series of planning choices: increasing the number of distinct signs, for example, increases the expressive power of the system at the expense of thematic unity and simplicity. Specific syntactic constructions--for instance: let's decree that doubling the length of a stroke denotes the presence of an r-sound--might make it possible for a user to record a bit of dictation more quickly (the most basic function of any shorthand, arguably), but might require too much practice, or be too hard to read back.

The output of the work, then, is the system. I've just started to read Beyond Pure Reason, by Boris Gasparov, and Saussure's basic bicameral division of language feels relevant here: the work is la langue, the system of rules that make up the system prior to the act of writing.

There is also la parole: the individual instances of the system in the world. Or, let's say: instances of writing which are intelligible according to the rules of the system. If la langue is Smith Shorthand, then la parole is the page of notes that I took in my most recent 1:1. That's under consideration, too. The marks made have to be pleasing to the eye or else the work is a failure. Not for the most heartless utilitarian, maybe, but we have emerged from that period of history during which shorthand existed solely in the realm of the useful.

This is important. If it were 1910 I might still be engaged in such an undertaking, but the spirit of it would be entirely otherwise. In 1910 shorthand was an economic necessity: it was a tool relied upon by secretaries and journalists to do their work. As such there was a bustling trade in the design and marketing of new shorthand systems, dozens of often-thoroughly-eccentric men competing to build a better mousetrap (I can't help but notice how outdated that locution is now, too. Have we reached a global optimum in mousetraps?).

For one thing, I probably wouldn't care very much how it looked. If I did care how it looked, it would only be insofar as the appearance of the written signs was able to advertise the utility and convenience of the system.

And as an artifact whose value was bound up fundamentally in its utility, my system would become a fundamentally economic one. I'd be engaging in the production of materials for the marketing and sale of my system, and I'd do so with the expectation that I emerged in the black.

So: we've passed out of the ruddy maturity of written shorthand, its market days, where the success of any work of the genre was some theoretically optimal product of its advertisement and its usefulness as a tool. Shorthand has declined into an age of recreation and beauty. Those few of us who would like to spend our time learning it or using it are much more likely to be motivated by that uneconomic side of human life.

We are interested and moved by shorthand. I have been devoting most of my creative cycles to the refinement and perfection of a totally novel shorthand system, and it is a certainty that the thing will not be used, ever, by more than a few people. More than one would already be a towering achievement. The aim, obviously, has to be the quality of the thing itself; I am dedicating this time to it because I think I'll derive some satisfaction from making it as good and as beautiful a system as I can. Once I'm done the thing will have to stand for itself. I intend to use it, of course, but if all I wanted was to have a quicker way to write then I could have spent that time learning Gregg and probably being better off for it. The point of this work has to be the thing itself, for its own sake, for some reason that is still partially mysterious to me.

But a langue can never become an objet d'art. A moka pot may have its gasket decay entirely and enjoy an afterlife, purely decorative, on the shelf of an Airbnb. One cannot frame and hang up a system, only use it. Even as the genre exits the economic phase of its life it can only be used.

We should be concerned about how the beauty of a langue can possibly be made evident to the human senses. The most obvious answer is that the speaker, when participating in the production of parole, is the one to experience the beauty. This seems to be the default case: as a speaker of English I am completely present to the beauty or the ugliness of the language itself (as distinct from the beauty of the words spoken), as I speak and as I'm spoken to; the less I understand any other language the less able I am to appreciate its syntax and word-formation rules as they are evinced in a fragment of speech.

As a computer programmer I am completely submerged in the beauty and ugliness of my program in ways that can only be most crudely gestured at when looked at from the outside, that is, by inspecting the program's output. As a programmer I have almost no way at all to communicate the beauty of the program I've written, even if the program, when executed, makes beautiful shapes appear on the screen. I experience the langue only by speaking it, that is, by manipulating the code that makes up the program.

But is this the only way to get at the thing itself? We wonder, I suppose, if translation is a possibility.

A system of rules has an aesthetic dimension. We must determine the various avenues of attack, how to get at that dimension from the outside. The one that presents itself is: learn the language. It proposes that the only way to make the rules into an active, alive thing is to recreate them inside of a human mind: an artificial flower can perfectly resemble a living one, but only a living one gives off the right scent.

Nevertheless, there is such a thing as a structure-preserving transformation; we are capable of articulating operations on objects that preserve at least some of their internal relationships, if not every incidental attribute. So we should spend at least a little time looking for alternate ways in before we resign ourselves to battering down the front door. There might yet be a way to write Smith Shorthand as a poem, or even as a moka pot on a shelf.

Other Publications

This week I wrote about Mariglia, a very fine card game from Sardinia that continues to rise in my estimation. Recommended to you who are interested in games.