Wow! Thank you so much BerylPratt. You are spot on referring to a shunting movement. My family member was a railway man and the personnel file this entry comes from is his railway file. A correction though - on a railway, there is no such thing as a snatch block.

Could the shorthand read "catch point" ?

A catch point is a safety device fitted to a railway siding and designed to prevent a railway wagon from travelling too far and on to a main line where it should not be. It is portable so it can be removed to allow free passage along the line if required. If it is not removed then it serves to de-rail the wagon, which is what apparently happened in this instance.

The great mystery is why this entry on the personnel file was written in shorthand so that very few people would have been able to read it. The only entry so written in shorthand in a lengthy and detailed history file. My family member is long since deceased so it will forever remain a mystery.

Goodness gracious.

It sounds like the addressee forgot to flip a switch, causing a train to derail—perhaps in a coal mine, spilling coal all over the place. (An entire mainline train derailing would almost certainly have led to consequences far more serious than a reprimand.)

Every now and then, this subreddit turns up something genuinely fascinating.

Pretty sure it says "I have a urinary tract infection", but that's taking some liberty with the last three words.

See the repost for transcription

Failed to duly remove the snatch block before the

performance of a certain ?shunting movement,

incons* of which wagon 660 ‘M’

was derailed. You are warned to ensure that you do not ?get ?in/any

similar ?gaffes in future.

(*?="in consequence")

Dear Cliff (in ?Reading)* *UK Placename

You are sweet

Love Janet

(Consonant structure only for those names, could be other vowels)

This looks like Pitman and needs to be rotated to make it easier to read for those who can read Pitman.

What country is this from?

It's definitely not Gregg.

The modern stenographer. A complete system of lightline phonography .. : Thornton, George Howard, 1851-1920 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet ArchiveThis guy used his unique Pitman with only lightline in his work back in 1870s it uses the old Pitman vowel system and he advocates not doing away with shading completely when it comes to names but he claims that shading can be discarded in the majority of cases. Probably a dubious claim but an interesting idea.

Give it a day or so. We have Pitman's experts.

I am quietly chuffed and smug about how that turned out, got my Morris Kligman hat on methinks.

Love the open source joke :)

First aid, hearing aid, walking with the aid of a stick, band aid …

The English language is very rich. Some words are little used colloquially, others in different speech registers. Shorthand needs to cover them all.

I think after what I transcribed he had had too much to drink. I've looked at it a few times and just can't make sense of it. I think in the middle of it he says "I am getting caught up on the walking Saturday".

Lee, I’m so grateful to you for what you transcribed to English! Reba was the future wife of the soldier. WWII basic training was grueling but they also had time for some fun. Thank you! Phil

"Dear Reba,

Just passing a few minutes here at our (?) club waiting for the (?) to start and thought I'd drop you a card. I am going to the (?) as I am all caught up with my work for the night. They are having a swell show here in the club and boy can those (?) boys have me out with the sweet and hot music."

After that it starts to get a little unclear to me.

Lee

In practice, the distinguishing vowel marks were almost never used in Gregg. If you look at any of the textbooks, or the magazines like The Gregg Writer and Today's Secretary, you'll have to look a long time to find them. I learned Diamond Jubilee in high school in the 1960s, and wasn't even aware they existed until I became more interested in the whole Gregg picture later.

Gregg was developed and marketed as a purely practical tool for rapid writing, not as a precise phonetic or logical system. And the expectation was always that a writer would transcribe the material shortly afterwards.

I've looked at a lot of requests over the years to "please help me read my grandmother's recipe book" etc. and the issues in reading haven't ever been about distinguishing vowels. Usually the issues are poor proportions, bad penmanship, or idiosyncratic usage.

So I think if you want precise vowel distinctions, you're going to have to look elsewhere.

Brilliant as always!

Try to remember, hundreds of thousands of people successfully learned and used this system as secretaries and even court reporters. Marking the vowels is helpful in rare situations, like distinguishing between "John" and "Joan" the first time you write a person's name in a particular block of text. But most of the time it is not necessary.

By the way, sees/seas/seize/cease are all written the same way. Have some fun with it! Imagine the fast food chain Shake Shack, what would their signs look like if they wrote their name in Gregg instead of the Latin alphabet. "Open source" and "open sores" have the same shorthand outlines, and personally I find that appropriate.

Btw, despite me being ESL, I barely use the word "aid". Who tf says "aid" in 2026? Just use "help".

On the other side, I (and any logical person) use "buy" way more often than "purchase". So that's a drawback.

This is one of the reasons I realized Gregg wasn’t for me. I wanted the vowel sounds to be expressed and fairly clear. But I was using shorthand for journaling, not speed. (I tried Grafoni, and after a couple personal modifications, I like how clear it is to read and write.)

That depends entirely on your motive for learning shorthand. If you are learning it expressly for speed, then you would omit all unnecessary strokes and marks in your writing, and defer to context when it comes time to read it back and transcribe into full English spelling.

If you are simply after a quicker or perhaps more private personal writing method, you may prefer to mark all vowels with precision.

The system I use omits all vowels and defers to context entirely, and it generally works very well for me. When I'm writing for speed, I make the concession of always writing an initial and terminal vowel because omitting them really does hamper interpretation when reading back, but otherwise omit all vowels. When I'm writing purely for personal use, as in my personal journaling, I am writing for secrecy and since I want complete legibility when reading it back years down the road, I use full precise vowels all the way through on all words. Two different use cases, two different approaches, same system.

In this context since the options easily narrow down to just 'aid' a vowel mark isnt necessary. 'aid' is really the only word that makes sense here.

Aid, for sure. Does this mean I'll have to deal with having to choose between words? Do some Gregg shorthanders always mark their vowels to compensate?