Both pages of this card were expressed in (hand-crafted) Pitman’s shorthand. This achieves its economy of strokes and compression of space by some interesting techniques, including variable intensity of stroke and variable positioning relative to the line – so shorthand needs lined paper.
Front page
This translates as:
Inside page
This translates as:
My now-late mother had been proficient in shorthand when she was employed as a secretary nearly fifty years earlier. I am not sure now whether my omission of the hyphen which correct English requires in “eighty-eight” was simply an error or – more likely – that the hyphen simply does not exist in the Pitman code.
Version 23: Revised 23 December 2008
Brian Barker