Down the Mountain – Part 1

The sport of bobsleigh or bobsled has been part of the Olympic Games since the first Winter Games celebrated in Chamonix, France, in 1924. This article, transcribed by yours truly in Anniversary Gregg, explains some of the features and dangers of the sport, as well as some of the experiences of those who practice it.

Attachment: down-the-mountain-part-1.pdf 


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  1. Can’t wait for the next part!

    There was a nice section with descriptive words of scenery at the end of p4 and the start of p5.

    But as usual I have some questions.

    I could not guess these three
    p2c1l9 first outline
    p2c1l11 last outline
    p3c1l20 first outline

    And I was unsure about these
    p1c2l1 is the third outline “misstep”?
    p3c2l4 is the last outline “under brush”? (not a familiar term to me)
    p6c1l1 is the fourth outline “trough”?
    p6c1l4 is the sixth outline just “heave”?

    I also saw some things that may be wrong
    p1c1l6 Should it read “is the” rather than “in the”?
    p3c1l3 is it “here they come”?
    p4c1l3 was an “ing” missed from “steering”?
    p5c2l1 is a “what” missed? “Stevens knew [what] he had to do”

    But this transcription raised something which I have meant to query for some while. The use of the o and u as over and under.
    In the past I have used these often in words such as understand, underneath; overcome, overly and so on (and of course for the words over and under). These are stand-alone words — the o or u is close to and is part of the word.
    I noticed you put the symbol close to the following word even when the over or under were separate words whereas I had always written them with a normal space between the o or u and the following word. I know you are correct as I saw (for the first time!) it used like that in the manual (and also when the abbreviation was introduced in the 1916 manual towards the end). They show “over the” and “under the” for example. I stand corrected in this and can see that they form part of a “phrase” and are thus written as a disjoint “part” of the following outline as one would join words in a phrase. Phrases like “under control” (p2c2l9), “over to the” (p3c1l5), “end over end” (p3c2l19) come naturally and I may start doing that (it may save me time and space).
    However I would draw the line at “over until” on p3c1l17. The “over” in this case is part of the previous words, and a distinct pause in reading is implied before “until”, and if taking dictation (not that I ever do) I would think that one would write the “over” as a single word (brief form) rather than associating it with the next set of words commencing with “until”. It makes no difference, but I’ll not ALWAYS be putting the o or u immediately above/before every word that follows it.

    It was nice to see quite a lot of disjoined words (e.g. “loudspeaker” – p2c2l22).

    I was interested in your writing of photographer where you tilted the “[o]graph” into the following “r” (“er”). It is probably only with repeated use of the word that such a form comes first to mind. I would have kept the suffix “o” at its usual upright angle and followed it with the “r” with an angle joining, or even completely disjoined. My reason is that the “[o]graph” suffix is so fixed in my mind that it would be written before I thought oto put down the “er”.

    So a provocatively very interesting article.

    P.S. I hope the photographer with the wire had more than a severe reprimand!!

    1. I made the corrections; thanks for letting me know. Also, the outlines that you were unsure of were correct (I wrote “heavy” instead of “heave”, which I corrected).

      About the placement of the disjoined prefix, this is for the most part writer dependent. The general guideline is to write it just above the line and next to the following stroke so that you know it is disjoined. About “over” and “under”, I write the next outline close to it, regardless of whether it belongs to it or not, out of habit. It’s a style thing: as long as you can transcribe it, I don’t see an issue with writing it with a normal space; writing it close makes it obvious what the word is.

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