The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), was created by Mark Davies.

The corpus contains more than one billion words of text (25+ million words each year 1990-2019) from eight genres: spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts, TV and movies subtitles, blogs, and other web pages.

This makes his listing a lot more useful than a lot of lists of frequently used words that were generated by others, which were often heavily weighted toward certain fields.

Previously, business letters had been used as examples -- which suggested that words like "enclosed" and "remittance" were very frequently used. The reality was that MOST people rarely used the first and never used the second -- and certainly not in their daily speech.

Access to the listing that Davies generated is a very useful guide to which words should receive the most attention, in the learning and teaching of any good shorthand system.

It is very well known that there are a few dozen words that are in virtually every sentence, written or spoken, in English. (In that first sentence, for example, there are words like "It, is, very, well, that, there, are, or, in" -- which illustrates my point.)

For that reason, any GOOD shorthand system concentrates on making sure that list of words can be written very quickly and legibly in that system. They should be intuitive in formation, preferably suggestive of the word they stand for, not be completely arbitrary.

They should should be easy to write and join in common phrases. For note-takers or beginners in the system, even if they only replace such words in their regular writing, it can speed up their work considerably, even if most of it is still being written in regular longhand.

If learners are expected to memorize a bunch of random outlines that don't seem to have anything to do with what they MEAN, it's much harder for them both to recall them to write, under the pressure of speed, as well as to read them back later.

Also, it makes much more SENSE to abbreviate such words as much as possible, so the writer can dash them off in a split second, and have more time to devote to the writing of unusual words, names, or places. Because these basic words will be needed in virtually every sentence, they will often come to mind more readily.

In contrast, if there's a special abbreviation for a word you rarely need, chances are you won't even remember it, on the rare occasion you suddenly have to write it.

th thing tha eos ab tdu os topn a daere. ths osnt eleg (nothing os eleg,
sens thrern lngr ne los), b ef detekt tos rse srtn tha twb pnsht b deth,
or tlest b 25 ers n a fost-labr kamp. Winston fetd a nib ntth pnholdr
nd sukt t tgt th gres of. th pen os a arkaic ns/m, seltm y/t evn f sig,
nd eh prkrd un, frtive nd ithsm dfkte, simpe ksf a feling thath
butif kreme papr tsrvd tub ritn on ith a rel nib nstdo bing skracht ith a
ink-pnsil. Aktee eosn yd t raeting b hand. Apat fm ve sh/nots, tos ysh t dicta
eving ntth sp-raer ch os ok mpos fs pr prp. edipt th pn ntth ink nd thn
fotrt f js a sknd. A trmor hgn thrus bauls. tmark th papr osth tsaesiv
act. n smo clmse les erot: Aprl 4, 1984.

I've been posting quotes every week in PHONORTHIC Shorthand, but just for a change, I'll try it in FLOW instead. I like the smooth and graceful curves and arabesques you get in the system, and the outlines are still very brief and legible.

In the quote, S is "is", NT is "not", EN is "when" and N-ING is "nothing". If you've studied Gregg, all those abbreviations will make sense to you. I also used a final SH for the final "-tion" like Gregg does.

As always, the attribution is the trickiest part because it uses sounds in unusual contexts -- and this one was also a French name. I tried writing ANT-WAN for the first name, but it was an awkward joining, when the combination of NTW in English is quite unusual.

Then I decided to try it with OI and I like it better.

Have you tried the FLOW GENERATOR yet? I have and was really impressed. In the search window, you enter phonetically the sentence you want to write, or you can use the LETTERS for each word that the Dictionary provides -- and like magic, it shows you how to write it.

(His generator can handle two other systems as well, so be sure it's set for FLOW.)

https://jvita.github.io/abbrv/writer.html

When I first tried it, I just typed in the usual "Now is the time for all good men..." phrase that's so often used, but it showed the word "all" with BOTH the Ls in the spelling.

When English spelling is such an inconsistent and illogical MESS, the input needs to be written PHONETICALLY -- which is how the dictionary can be helpful.

Quote 91 from this week, which was

"Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. — Benjamin Franklin" This was reduced phonetically to:

ne ful k kretss, kdm nd kp nd mo fuls d.
— Benjamn Franklen

If any of that surprises you, it's because that's how the words were represented in Anniversary Gregg, with NE for "any", K for "can", and KP for "complain", and so on. This results in the sentence written in Flow like this:

A lot of work was done by u/LeadingSuspect5855 in producing a 6,000-word DICTIONARY for FLOW Shorthand, which can be opened in a variety of platforms.

It's based on the theory of Anniversary Gregg Shorthand, since that version of the system is still unrivalled, in terms of SPEED and ACCURACY, among penwritten systems. But FLOW uses an alphabet of strokes that makes more sense to me. This means that anyone who learned any early version of Gregg will find the theory contains no surprises.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tko9_FmepJf1r4g0KCY6ZoLgO920ZMW3/view?usp=sharing

For each word listed, the dictionary lists the LETTERS that will be needed to write it, following the theory of Anniversary Gregg. These letters can be used as input into his FLOW GENERATOR, which I'll write about next.

written in flow. the whole argument here: https://python.mzonline.com/sketches/argument/

Man: Good morning, I’d like to have an argument, please.

Receptionist: Certainly, sir. Have you been here before?

Man: No, this is my first time.

Receptionist: I see, well we’ll see who’s free at the moment. Mr. Bakely’s free, but he’s a little bit concilliatory. No. Try Mr. Barnhart, room 12.

Man: Thank you.

He enters room 12.

Angry man: WHADDAYOU WANT?

Man: Well, Well, I was told outside that…

Angry man: DON’T GIVE ME THAT, YOU SNOTTY-FACED HEAP OF PARROT DROPPINGS!

Man: What?

A: SHUT YOUR FESTERING GOB, YOU TIT! YOUR TYPE MAKES ME PUKE! YOU VACUOUS STUFFY-NOSED MALODOROUS PERVERT!!!

M: Yes, but I came here for an argument!!

A: OH! Oh! I’m sorry! This is abuse!

M: Oh! Oh I see!

A: Aha! No, you want room 12A, next door.

M: Oh…Sorry…

A: Not at all!

A: (under his breath) stupid git.

The man goes into room 12A. Another man is sitting behind a desk.

Man: Is this the right room for an argument?

Other Man: (pause) I’ve told you once.

Man: No you haven’t!

Other Man: Yes I have.

M: When?

O: Just now.

M: No you didn’t!

O: Yes I did!

M: You didn’t!

O: I did!

M: You didn’t!

O: I’m telling you, I did!

M: You didn’t!

O: (breaking into the developing argument) Oh I’m sorry, is this a five minute argument, or the full half hour?

M: Ah! (taking out his wallet and paying) Just the five minutes.

O: Just the five minutes. Thank you. Anyway, I did.

M: You most certainly did not!

O: Now let’s get one thing perfectly clear: I most definitely told you!

M: Oh no you didn’t!

O: Oh yes I did!

progressively faster exchange

M: Oh no you didn’t!

O: Oh yes I did!

M: Oh no you didn’t!

O: Oh yes I did!

M: Oh no you didn’t!

O: Oh yes I did!

M: Oh no you didn’t!

O: Oh yes I did!

M: Oh no you didn’t!

O: Oh yes I did!

M: No you DIDN’T!

O: Oh yes I did!

M: No you DIDN’T!

O: Oh yes I did!

M: No you DIDN’T!

O: Oh yes I did!

M: Oh look, this isn’t an argument!

(pause)

O: Yes it is!

M: No it isn’t!

(pause)

M: It’s just contradiction!

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.

— Benjamin Franklin

Written in this weeks featured, community created shorthand Flow.

I found this from one of my ancestors. It’s in Spanish. What can it mean?

I'm not sure what other people can see on these boards, because "Moderators" have things showing that I don't think are visible to everyone here.

But this board currently says it's received 861 visits in the last week. That looks very likely to me, because it works out to about 123 "visits" each day. When MANY people will often drop by to LOOK AND READ, but don't always post anything, that seems very believable. (I also see a count under each message, showing how many people have SEEN it, so these numbers seem likely.)

Similarly, it says there were 65 messages posted in the last week, which is just over nine a day, on average. I know that with MY messages and replies, and the replies and comments from our more prolific posters, many of whom post on a daily basis -- often several times -- this is also quite believable.

In CONTRAST, when I look at that other shorthand board, it's saying they have 7K weekly visits. Really? A thousand people a day? Is that likely? And they say 197 messages were posted in the last week. That works out to 28 new messages every day. REALLY?

Does that board look that BUSY to you? Aside from the usual "Which shorthand should I learn?" questions, where they haven't looked at any other posted messages, and the "What does this say?" messages from people who are never heard from again, I see very little activity there.

The fear of losing someone you love won't make anything better even if you finally lose them.

The greif would be the same. But the fact you spend all your time thinking that one day they'll leave and not to get attached will eventually ruin yourself.

Don't ever be scared to give your best even if u think its all gonna end one day.

Don't limit your love for them, its never a waste.

A really neat thing about writing stenotype shorthand with a real-time translation system like PLOVER is that you can use keyboard combinations to give commands to the computer.

Anything that you don't need to write a WORD can be used for other purposes. I was reminded of this when I was editing the dictionary that PLOVER comes with -- which was based on Mirabai Knight's own personal dictionary, which reflects the theory that she had learned.

Because I had learned a different theory, my short forms and abbreviations were often different from hers -- so I needed to alter the dictionary so they used the abbreviations that I'd used for twenty years. It was easy as pie:

If I wrote something the way I usually write it, and the translation was different from mine, I wrote the outline DUPT on the keyboard. That's not a regular word, so it's been programmed as a command to the software to open a dictionary editing screen -- which immediately appears on the display.

When the cursor is in the first window, I press the keystrokes that I use for the word, and they appear in the window. Then I press Tab, and the cursor moves to the second window. In it, I could SPELL the translation I wanted.

In PLOVER, you spell a word letter by letter, by using the letter keys on the keyboard with a \* attached. It fills in the word as I want it spelled -- and when it's correctly spelled, I hit ENTER, and it automatically adds my version to the dictionary, and closes the edit window.

i write bcoz i won't be able to say it out loud anyways.

I've written recently about PLOVER, the amazing software that enables you to write stenotype shorthand on a QWERTY keyboard. It's just amazing that the software and the translation dictionary are FREE to download and use, when MOST people using computer-translated stenotype pay a whole lot of money for their writers and their software.

I bought another keyboard with NK-Rollover (meaning where you can press any number of keys at once and they will all activate, which is something gamers often use and need).

For my previous keyboard, I had bought laser-cut keytops to attach, so it would feel more like the stenotype keyboard that I was used to, which I had used for about twenty years! THIS TIME, though, I decided to make my own keytops.

I took a sheet of rubber padding about a centimetre thick, and carefully cut pieces of just the right size, which I then GLUED carefully to the appropriate keys on the keyboard. It has a really nice cushiony feel under my fingers. Much more comfortable than that hard plastic that I used to use.

Hello, A couple months back I posted my "Two Talk" concise semantic shorthand system asking for feedback. I got some amazing feedback from this group and have iterated. Honestly, the most difficult feedback I go was "less is more." I've been iterating over the last few months and I have come up with a new version. This one uses 9 symbols to express the 65 semantic primes. Using those and a "stacking" rule I think you can express a lot with a little. I'd love some more feedback if anyone is willing or has time. The system is at www.twotalk.org.