Dateline: Hollywood

This article in Simplified Gregg about the secretary to Sheilah Graham Westbrook, one of the most powerful Hollywood’s gossip reporters, appeared in the October 1956 issue of Today’s Secretary.

Attachment: dateline-hollywood.pdf


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  1. This was a bit of struggle. I didn't know what Vaudeville was, I think 'phone' needs its vowel, I have never heard anyone say 'hunt up', 'syndicate' is used in a way I was not aware of until I checked my dictionary and for some reason, 'much time' took ages to register in my brain!
    Also, on the last page, starting with line 9: 'When Adele cannot find the data requested, she tries to refer the fan to whatever studio or other sources should be able to furnish the information.' This doesn't seem to read right; have I missed something?

  2. The sentence is odd. Think of a comma after "studio", and it makes a little more sense.

    The word "source" is a singular.

    In Simplified and early series, "phone" is written without the hook because it is an abbreviation of "telephone", which was written without the hook as well.

    1. Interesting, I stand corrected! I also checked the Most Used words book, and it is there with the hook. In the Simplified dictionary, phone is written without the hook, though.

  3. I don't know why I added the 's' to 'source'…
    My DJS dictionary has 'f o n' for 'phone', so I'm not alone in thinking it needs the 'o'. 🙂
    I like the intersection for TV; would this be transcribed as TV or as 'television'?

  4. I have both the Simplified and DJS dictionaries, and I have PDFs of the 1916 & 1930 dictionaries. I am the sort of person that likes dictionaries, somewhat sad really, but I can't help it…

    1. I have the Simplified dictionary and have made use of the Anni pdf version. I wish I had the Simplified in electronic form also, because it's nice for portability and for searching.

    2. Jason, a few thoughts come to mind about having a portable version of the SImplified dictionary.

      archive.org has an electronic version of the dictionary but it can only be checked out by one visitor at a time… https://archive.org/details/greggshortha00greg

      There is a miniature edition of the dictionary, maybe easier to carry around. I see used copies of it float by on eBay and Amazon occasionally.

      Also I imagine one could buy a spare copy of the dictionary, slice out the pages with an Xacto knife and run them through a scanner. I am not a lawyer but I don't think this would get you in trouble unless you distributed your scan to other people.

  5. I saw these comments, and wanted to chime in on "phone." I, too, would have written f-o-n because I know I've seen it written that way. I could swear it was in the Simplified manual, but perhaps it was in Notehand.

    Not having reads this story, I looked up in my Simified dictionary to see what you two are discussing, and to confirm Carlos — although at this point Carlos seems to have an infallible knowledge of Gregg, so I needn't really bother to fact-check. 😀

    On a related topic, were these articles written for someone who has done the entire first-level course? In this case, that means the entire Simplified manual. I've avoided these articles because I couldn't read much of them.

    For reference, I'm at lesson 32. I paused my progress to review the reading assignments in the last few lessons. I was encouraged this morning by being able to read half of the first column of this article. 🙂 But it still seems like these would be best read later, as they presumably use all the devices of the manual.

    1. Assume that the readings require knowledge of all theory, but you can always try. Some readings will say something like "requires the first xx lessons" or something to that effect if you don't need a full knowledge of the system to transcribe them.

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