bored o’ the snord & all aboard width da fnord

BTW, do you know where to buy a cap’n Crunch whistle?

NO PROBLEMO, EH, CAPT’N. STOP. GOOGLE IT. STOP.

{slash marks removed}

Ham radio operators do not use [Stop] in their messages. Only telegraph operators do. Well use to…

A 1928 booklet entitled “How To Write Telegraphs Properly” says:

If you do not intend to stipulate that marks of punctuation be transmitted, write your message without punctuation and read it carefully to make sure that it is not ambiguous. If it seems impossible to convey your meaning clearly without the use of punctuation, use may be made of the celebrated word “stop,” which is known the world over as the official telegraphic or cable word for “period.”

This word “stop” may have perplexed you the first time you encountered it in a message. Use of this word in telegraphic communications was greatly increased during the World War, when the Government employed it widely as a precaution against having messages garbled or misunderstood, as a result of the misplacement or emission of the tiny dot or period.

Officials felt that the vital orders of the Government must be definite and clear cut, and they therefore used not only the word “stop,” to indicate a period, but also adopted the practice of spelling out “comma,” “colon,” and “semi-colon.” The word “query” often was used to indicate a question mark. Of all these, however, “stop” has come into most widespread use, and vaudeville artists and columnists have employed it with humorous effect, certain that the public would understand the allusion in connection with telegrams. It is interesting to note, too, that although the word is obviously English it has come into general use In all languages that are used in telegraphing or cabling.

The booklet elsewhere mentions that each punctuation mark is counted as one word for purposes of the fee. Thus you can see how the journalist writing the AP story got it wrong; it isn’t that a period costs money while “stop” is free but rather both cost the same but if you go for the period there’s a danger it will be accidentally omitted.

Hey Marina! Do you have any interesting stories for the word STOP?

“REAR-AIRING”—is a good thing

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