Post-Modern English?


When I first went through the Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified a couple of years ago it was like taking a time warp. I had posted an add in the local paper and hired a lovely retired lady to tutor me through it. It was a great experience and we had a lot of fun, but I don't think she recognised how foreign the material in that book was to me. The business memos which dominate the reading exercises seemed to use an entirely different set of vocabulary from the emails that I read and write everyday. Memorizing brief forms for words like "automobile" "remittance" "Dear Sir" and "railroad" made me wonder if Simplified was going to be efficient when I started outlining my own daily material.
I'm sure those of you studying Anniversary or 1916 have run into this even more, and while I love this unique perspective into the way people thought and wrote a generation or three before me, I also wonder if you have had to "optimise" your Gregg to adapt to the vocabulary of today's instant-messaging, paypal driven globalized language. Do you think Gregg needs to be tweaked (within the philosopy of your Gregg system) as English usage evolves?

(by skousend for everyone)

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