-- How do you rank yourself among writers
(living) and of the immediate past?
-- I often think there should exist a special typographical
sign for a smile -- some sort of concave mark,
a supine round bracket, which I would now like to
trace in reply to your question.
Even beyond explicit codebooks, telegraph operators extensively used standardized abbreviations, meaning what they actually sent/received was remarkably similar to SMS text-speak, for obvious reasons! "Wr r ty gg r 9" => "Where are they going for No. 9?": http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2015/05/11/history_of_t...
