1 00:00:00,149 --> 00:00:05,300 You probably type at about 40 words per minute—that’s the average typing speed, and on average, 2 00:00:05,300 --> 00:00:06,590 you’re probably pretty average. 3 00:00:06,590 --> 00:00:08,570 But, hey, I don’t know you. 4 00:00:08,570 --> 00:00:12,650 If you write a lot for your job, you’re probably closer to 60 or 70 words per minute. 5 00:00:12,650 --> 00:00:16,420 If you work a dispatch position of some kind, then you’re probably required to type 80 6 00:00:16,420 --> 00:00:18,130 to 95 words per minute. 7 00:00:18,130 --> 00:00:22,119 And if you are Stella Pajunas, the fastest typist in history—which you are not because 8 00:00:22,119 --> 00:00:26,100 she is a dead woman in Ohio and Ohio does not yet have access to the internet—then 9 00:00:26,100 --> 00:00:28,890 you can type at 216 words per minute. 10 00:00:28,890 --> 00:00:32,860 But here’s where it gets a little weird: if you’re a stenographer—the person who 11 00:00:32,860 --> 00:00:36,790 transcribes what’s being said in a courtroom or on live television—then you can probably 12 00:00:36,790 --> 00:00:43,570 type anywhere between 225 and 360 words per minute, which is faster than most people speak. 13 00:00:43,570 --> 00:00:47,970 So hold on—if Stella was the fastest typist in history, how is it that the little old 14 00:00:47,970 --> 00:00:50,590 lady in your local courtroom can type even faster? 15 00:00:50,590 --> 00:00:53,330 Well, it’s because she’s cheating. 16 00:00:53,330 --> 00:00:54,330 And by cheating I mean… 17 00:00:54,330 --> 00:00:57,050 using really cool special techniques that I’m gonna spend the rest of this video explaining. 18 00:00:57,050 --> 00:01:01,160 The art of writing words really super fast dates all the way back to Ancient Greece with 19 00:01:01,160 --> 00:01:05,010 this guy, Cicero, who had the same job as I do: saying kind of clever stuff all day 20 00:01:05,010 --> 00:01:07,050 long while his slaves wrote it down for him. 21 00:01:07,050 --> 00:01:13,320 But one of his slaves, Tiro, had some trouble keeping up with all of this wisdom. 22 00:01:13,320 --> 00:01:19,110 So, Tiro devised a new writing system called “Tironian Notes”—it was a set of about 23 00:01:19,110 --> 00:01:23,960 4,000 easy-to-write symbols that represented commonly-used words, pieces of words, or phrases, 24 00:01:23,960 --> 00:01:27,990 allowing Tiro to transcribe every detail of Cicero’s fortune cookie ramblings without 25 00:01:27,990 --> 00:01:29,170 missing a beat. 26 00:01:29,170 --> 00:01:32,640 This earned him the nickname “the father of stenography,” a title that never made 27 00:01:32,640 --> 00:01:36,420 sense to him because stenography wouldn’t be invented for another two thousand years. 28 00:01:36,420 --> 00:01:39,710 This form of shorthand actually stuck around for quite a while, and is still in partial 29 00:01:39,710 --> 00:01:44,229 use today—the Tironian “et,” meaning “and,” can be seen on road signs in parts 30 00:01:44,229 --> 00:01:45,840 of Ireland and Scotland. 31 00:01:45,840 --> 00:01:50,240 For hundreds of years, this was how most systems for transcribing speech worked: you’d take 32 00:01:50,240 --> 00:01:54,350 existing letters and words and just replace them with symbols that were quicker to write. 33 00:01:54,350 --> 00:01:59,520 But in the 1800s, a guy named Sir Isaac Pitman had a breakthrough: it turned out, you could 34 00:01:59,520 --> 00:02:04,420 write down what people were saying even faster if you focused on sounds instead of letters. 35 00:02:04,420 --> 00:02:08,190 Pitman’s new system, which he published in this book, used basic lines and dots to 36 00:02:08,190 --> 00:02:11,599 represent sounds—as an example, here’s what it would look like if the court reporter 37 00:02:11,599 --> 00:02:15,069 was transcribing a lawyer who took too many melatonin gummies and fell asleep in the middle 38 00:02:15,069 --> 00:02:16,090 of a deposition. 39 00:02:16,090 --> 00:02:20,579 The actual system itself is pretty complicated, but it’s not super important for this video—all 40 00:02:20,579 --> 00:02:24,010 you need to know is that phonetic transcription is cool and normal letters are lame and that’s 41 00:02:24,010 --> 00:02:26,970 eventually how we ended up with this thing: the stenograph. 42 00:02:26,970 --> 00:02:31,040 This is the futuristic gizmo that can type words faster than people speak them. 43 00:02:31,040 --> 00:02:34,290 Now, this stenograph might look kind of like a normal keyboard that someone got a great 44 00:02:34,290 --> 00:02:37,569 deal on because it was missing most of its keys, but it doesn’t work like a normal 45 00:02:37,569 --> 00:02:41,660 keyboard at all; sort of like with Pitman shorthand, the stenograph doesn’t spell 46 00:02:41,660 --> 00:02:46,189 words with letters, it spells them with syllables—it’s only concerned with the individual sounds 47 00:02:46,189 --> 00:02:49,150 that make up a word, and not actually how they’re spelled. 48 00:02:49,150 --> 00:02:50,659 But how does it type in whole syllables? 49 00:02:50,659 --> 00:02:55,010 Well, basically, the keys are broken up into three sections; these consonants represent 50 00:02:55,010 --> 00:02:58,890 the beginning of a syllable, these consonants represent the ending of a syllable, and these 51 00:02:58,890 --> 00:03:00,969 vowels represent, well, vowels. 52 00:03:00,969 --> 00:03:05,099 If that sounds confusing to you, don’t worry: it’s gonna get way more confusing so you 53 00:03:05,099 --> 00:03:06,889 can just kind of zone out now. 54 00:03:06,889 --> 00:03:10,919 When a stenographer types a syllable, they don’t just press a single key—they press 55 00:03:10,919 --> 00:03:14,720 all the keys that make up the syllable at once: the letters at the beginning, the letters 56 00:03:14,720 --> 00:03:16,659 at the end, and the vowel in the middle. 57 00:03:16,659 --> 00:03:20,559 It’s kind of like a chord on a piano, if every piano composition sounded like a LegalEagle 58 00:03:20,559 --> 00:03:21,559 video. 59 00:03:21,559 --> 00:03:24,669 To show you how fast this is, let’s say someone in the courtroom just said, “I learned 60 00:03:24,669 --> 00:03:26,609 how to commit arson on Half as Interesting.” 61 00:03:26,609 --> 00:03:31,559 On a normal keyboard, that would take 52 strokes to type out; on a stenograph, it would only 62 00:03:31,559 --> 00:03:32,689 take 11. 63 00:03:32,689 --> 00:03:36,549 Now, two quick things to point out about this translation—since there are only a handful 64 00:03:36,549 --> 00:03:40,769 of keys on either side of the keyboard, some letters are created by combining two other 65 00:03:40,769 --> 00:03:45,269 letters; this HAI superfan didn’t commit arsobp, he committed arson, but since there’s 66 00:03:45,269 --> 00:03:49,459 no “n” on the finishing half of the keyboard, it’s created by combining b and p. 67 00:03:49,459 --> 00:03:53,129 The other thing to point out is that some words or phrases that might commonly be used 68 00:03:53,129 --> 00:03:58,249 in a courtroom are bound to a single stroke—“interesting” might have 4 syllables, but it has a special 69 00:03:58,249 --> 00:04:01,870 shortcut because of how often this channel is cited in arson cases. 70 00:04:01,870 --> 00:04:06,439 For a long time, stenographs just outputted the exact letters that were typed, which kind 71 00:04:06,439 --> 00:04:09,519 of made it look like everyone in the courtroom was being possessed by the devil. 72 00:04:09,519 --> 00:04:13,069 But nowadays, these keyboards are hooked up to computers with built-in dictionaries that 73 00:04:13,069 --> 00:04:16,459 transcribe what’s being typed into readable language in real time. 74 00:04:16,459 --> 00:04:19,750 Of course, more and more courts have started to realize that they could just replace this 75 00:04:19,750 --> 00:04:23,490 whole elaborate system with another new-fangled technology called “recording audio,” so 76 00:04:23,490 --> 00:04:26,500 there’s a pretty good chance that this whole video won’t be relevant by the time you 77 00:04:26,500 --> 00:04:29,940 watch it and you’ve just wasted another six minutes of your precious life. 78 00:04:29,940 --> 00:04:33,139 But you know what’s not a waste of six minutes of your life? 79 00:04:33,139 --> 00:04:34,139 Reading. 80 00:04:34,139 --> 00:04:36,770 We could all stand to read a little more instead of doing… 81 00:04:36,770 --> 00:04:38,900 exactly what you’re doing right now, but it’s hard! 82 00:04:38,900 --> 00:04:39,900 We’re busy! 83 00:04:39,900 --> 00:04:41,960 And our attention spans have been fried by doing… 84 00:04:41,960 --> 00:04:42,960 exactly what you’re doing right now. 85 00:04:42,960 --> 00:04:46,160 So let me recommend a solution: our sponsor, Audible. 86 00:04:46,160 --> 00:04:49,630 Look, I just love Audible—being able to listen to my books while I’m doing dishes, 87 00:04:49,630 --> 00:04:54,840 driving to work, or taking a long flight has made it so much easier to get back into reading. 88 00:04:54,840 --> 00:04:58,680 Audible Plus subscriptions come with a massive library of best-selling audiobooks that you 89 00:04:58,680 --> 00:05:02,400 can take with you anywhere, plus if there’s an audiobook you want that’s not part of 90 00:05:02,400 --> 00:05:06,199 their streaming catalog, you can pick up an extra title for free, every single month and 91 00:05:06,199 --> 00:05:07,740 keep it forever. 92 00:05:07,740 --> 00:05:12,259 On top of that, they have a killer lineup of podcasts like What's the Story? 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