From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Dec 11 2004 - 18:12:35 CST
From: "Séamas Ó Brógáin" <leabhair@iol.ie>
> John wrote:
>
>> As far as I know, they were first used in formal invitations (to
>> weddings,
>> funerals, dances, etc.) in the corner of the card, as both shorter and
>> more fancy than the older phrase "The favor of your reply is requested".
>
> This is correct. The practice dates from the end of the nineteenth
> century.
At that time, transmission of text on long distances was with telegraphic
systems, where texts had to be short because they were expensive, and
because the available bandwidths were very limited to support many
customers, notably for long distance and international communications.
I would not be surprized if this acronym was defined in some internationally
accepted set of abbreviations used by telegraphists, so that their clients
became exposed to these acronyms when reading telegrams received from their
local post office that did not take the time to reconvert these acronyms to
full words...
I have read some articles about the existence in telegraphic standards of
such list of abbreviations. Isn't there a remaining, possibly deprecated,
ISO standard about them? (For example there has existed the 5-bit system,
because it was important to limit the available charset, and to limit the
bandwidth required to transmit messages, at a time were searches on data
compression was not as advanced and successful as today, and the computing
resources or human capabilities to decode complex compression schemes would
have been too much expensive or impossible to satisfy on a large scale).
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