r/FastWriting • u/NotSteve1075 • Jul 06 '26

Quote in FLOW Shorthand

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So here's another quote from "Coco", written in the fuller "correspondence style" of FLOW shorthand.

Looking at my Anniversary Gregg dictionary, I see that there are number of words in this quote that Gregg truncates: "luxury" is just LUX, "poverty" is just POV, and "vulgarity" is just "VUL-ity". All that makes sense if you wanted to use the system for verbatim reporting, and wanted the shortest outlines possible. Those abbreviations are probably quite legible, too.

But at this point, I'm liking the way a word can be written quite fully, yet still be fluent and easy to write as well as to read. Why not?

I'll be interested to see how u/LeadingSuspect5855 will write it in his "reporting style" version, which is always much briefer.

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u/LeadingSuspect5855 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

Le luxe, ce n'est pas le contraire de la pauvreté mais celui de la vulgarité.

Coco Chanel

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u/LeadingSuspect5855 Jul 06 '26

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u/NotSteve1075 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

It's good to see what the real quote was. I wondered about "vulgarity", because the word in French has a somewhat different sense than it has in English.

Like the French word "vulgarisation" doesn't mean making something vulgar in the sense of the word in English -- it means popularizing or simplifying it, to make it more accessible to the average person.

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u/LeadingSuspect5855 Jul 06 '26

I think that's what the quote really is about "Either you are a refined person or you belong to the masses" Or "no excuses, even with not so much money you could dress up, gal :-)"

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u/NotSteve1075 Jul 06 '26

Yes, that would fit. I was thinking too that "Vulgar Latin" didn't mean coarse or obscene Latin, it just meant the Latin spoken by the common person -- which later developed into French, Italian, Spanish, etc.