You probably type at about 40 words per minute—that’s the average typing speed, and on average,
you’re probably pretty average.
But, hey, I don’t know you.
If you write a lot for your job, you’re probably closer to 60 or 70 words per minute.
If you work a dispatch position of some kind, then you’re probably required to type 80
to 95 words per minute.
And if you are Stella Pajunas, the fastest typist in history—which you are not because
she is a dead woman in Ohio and Ohio does not yet have access to the internet—then
you can type at 216 words per minute.
But here’s where it gets a little weird: if you’re a stenographer—the person who
transcribes what’s being said in a courtroom or on live television—then you can probably
type anywhere between 225 and 360 words per minute, which is faster than most people speak.
So hold on—if Stella was the fastest typist in history, how is it that the little old
lady in your local courtroom can type even faster?
Well, it’s because she’s cheating.
And by cheating I mean…
using really cool special techniques that I’m gonna spend the rest of this video explaining.
The art of writing words really super fast dates all the way back to Ancient Greece with
this guy, Cicero, who had the same job as I do: saying kind of clever stuff all day
long while his slaves wrote it down for him.
But one of his slaves, Tiro, had some trouble keeping up with all of this wisdom.
So, Tiro devised a new writing system called “Tironian Notes”—it was a set of about
4,000 easy-to-write symbols that represented commonly-used words, pieces of words, or phrases,
allowing Tiro to transcribe every detail of Cicero’s fortune cookie ramblings without
missing a beat.
This earned him the nickname “the father of stenography,” a title that never made
sense to him because stenography wouldn’t be invented for another two thousand years.
This form of shorthand actually stuck around for quite a while, and is still in partial
use today—the Tironian “et,” meaning “and,” can be seen on road signs in parts
of Ireland and Scotland.
For hundreds of years, this was how most systems for transcribing speech worked: you’d take
existing letters and words and just replace them with symbols that were quicker to write.
But in the 1800s, a guy named Sir Isaac Pitman had a breakthrough: it turned out, you could
write down what people were saying even faster if you focused on sounds instead of letters.
Pitman’s new system, which he published in this book, used basic lines and dots to
represent sounds—as an example, here’s what it would look like if the court reporter
was transcribing a lawyer who took too many melatonin gummies and fell asleep in the middle
of a deposition.
The actual system itself is pretty complicated, but it’s not super important for this video—all
you need to know is that phonetic transcription is cool and normal letters are lame and that’s
eventually how we ended up with this thing: the stenograph.
This is the futuristic gizmo that can type words faster than people speak them.
Now, this stenograph might look kind of like a normal keyboard that someone got a great
deal on because it was missing most of its keys, but it doesn’t work like a normal
keyboard at all; sort of like with Pitman shorthand, the stenograph doesn’t spell
words with letters, it spells them with syllables—it’s only concerned with the individual sounds
that make up a word, and not actually how they’re spelled.
But how does it type in whole syllables?
Well, basically, the keys are broken up into three sections; these consonants represent
the beginning of a syllable, these consonants represent the ending of a syllable, and these
vowels represent, well, vowels.
If that sounds confusing to you, don’t worry: it’s gonna get way more confusing so you
can just kind of zone out now.
When a stenographer types a syllable, they don’t just press a single key—they press
all the keys that make up the syllable at once: the letters at the beginning, the letters
at the end, and the vowel in the middle.
It’s kind of like a chord on a piano, if every piano composition sounded like a LegalEagle
video.
To show you how fast this is, let’s say someone in the courtroom just said, “I learned
how to commit arson on Half as Interesting.”
On a normal keyboard, that would take 52 strokes to type out; on a stenograph, it would only
take 11.
Now, two quick things to point out about this translation—since there are only a handful
of keys on either side of the keyboard, some letters are created by combining two other
letters; this HAI superfan didn’t commit arsobp, he committed arson, but since there’s
no “n” on the finishing half of the keyboard, it’s created by combining b and p.
The other thing to point out is that some words or phrases that might commonly be used
in a courtroom are bound to a single stroke—“interesting” might have 4 syllables, but it has a special
shortcut because of how often this channel is cited in arson cases.
For a long time, stenographs just outputted the exact letters that were typed, which kind
of made it look like everyone in the courtroom was being possessed by the devil.
But nowadays, these keyboards are hooked up to computers with built-in dictionaries that
transcribe what’s being typed into readable language in real time.
Of course, more and more courts have started to realize that they could just replace this
whole elaborate system with another new-fangled technology called “recording audio,” so
there’s a pretty good chance that this whole video won’t be relevant by the time you
watch it and you’ve just wasted another six minutes of your precious life.
But you know what’s not a waste of six minutes of your life?
Reading.
We could all stand to read a little more instead of doing…
exactly what you’re doing right now, but it’s hard!
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And our attention spans have been fried by doing…
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