Stenography is not Shorthand, but they are closely related, I guess. Children can learn anything...just imagine the complexity of human text and how it is acquired by the young. We are able to recognize wrinkled little characters on a page (or screen) and translate them in our brain to understanding, knowledge and emotion. It is beyond me. Squibbles which can make one cry, aroused...it is amazing.
I could increase my dexterity on a handheld (or a courtroom device using the layout of one of these goofy looking things) if I took the time, but I'm already too comfy with a keyboard where each key is as large as my fingerprints and each one creates what I am typing here. But if my parents had given me a typewriter as large as a postage stamp and a stylus the size of a needle when I was four years old, I bet I could poke it like a woodpecker and write poetry.
There is no reason at all that the stenography keyboard didn't become the standard for our devices today. If you put the card above in a baby's hand, it would make just as much sense as a typical keyboard...probably even more so, as it was developed to be even faster than regular typing. To the child the gibberish which results could eventually be read just like anything else. Steno even has it's own shortened language which appears tailor-make for tiny text. Check out the abbreviations here. OMG! WTF!!!
Remember back during the big right wing hub-bub over eubonics? Why, they're teaching BAD ENGLISH to our KIDS. Idiots. They've been teaching Shorthand to exploited women stenographers for a hundred years. In the deaf world, it was once controversial to teach sign language...as it supposedly would encourage deaf folks not to practice their lip-reading. Pffft. I think it was just jealousy from those who were too old to learn it and felt they were missing something.
The biggest use of stenography today is not stenography at all, it is SteGAnography, which is technique of hiding data in undecipherable wiggles. Just like shorthand. It is related to cryptography, which remarkably is ILLEGAL in some countries! (It makes it hard to read your mail.)
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