1942 Letter with unknown shorthand symbol

In the fourth line from the bottom, there is a sentence which reads, “The country is crying for Bombardiers (symbol) so what do we do?” I can’t figure out for the life of me what that symbol is. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

(by Andy for group greggshorthand)


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  1. Out of curiosity, what's the connection between this letter and the Anni shorthand your grandfather knew. I see one shorthand sign on the entire page — the "this" sign. Otherwise, no evident shorthand. Are there additional pages of this letter that were written in shorthand, or incorporated more shorthand script? I'd be happy to lend a hand with transcribing other docs if you need. For what it's worth, I don't think there's anything significance (at least not a shorthand-related significance) in the vertical stroke. Best of luck.

  2. Well, I've transcribed about a hundred letters so far, and he throws in shorthand symbols pretty regularly. Sometimes he would write entire sentences of shorthand, but for the most part he incorporates the symbols as part of his longhand sentence structure. The comma makes sense. I wouldn't say he was picky about writing, although he and I enjoyed a regular correspondence when I was younger, but he was certainly opinionated:) Thanks for all of the help. I'll be sure to post more images the next time I run into a problem.

  3. I don't write Gregg, but I did learn a different style of shorthand when I was in high school (many moons ago). I have since forgotten most of it–including the name of the shorthand style. It did, however, influence my longhand quite a bit. I learned how to incorporate many of the shortcuts into my longhand, which makes it faster for me to write, but almost impossible for people to read.

  4. To me, he wrote a comma, but he realized his "mistake" and changed to an em dash.

    Do you know if he was picky about writing, or about other things in life?

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