“ARRIVE TUESDAY STOP BRING CASH STOP”

There’s a brutal poetry to it. Stripped of all pleasantries, sheared of grammatical niceties, the message is pure, unadulterated information. This is “telegrammese,” the unique dialect born not of a culture or a region, but of a machine and its punishing business model. The telegraph, the 19th-century innovation that annihilated distance, also performed a kind of linguistic surgery on our language. By charging per word, it forced us to kill our darlings—and most of the verbs, articles, and prepositions along with them.

This forced economy of language didn’t just fade away with the last Morse code message. Its legacy is deeply embedded in the way we write today, echoing in everything from newspaper headlines to the text message you just sent. It was a change born of necessity that became a powerful stylistic choice.

The Grammar of Cost

Before the telegraph, long-distance communication moved at the speed of a horse or a ship. A letter from London to New York could take weeks. Samuel Morse’s invention in the 1840s changed everything. Suddenly, a message could cross a continent in minutes. But this speed came at a price, literally. Early telegraph companies charged by the word, and every single one—even “a”, “the”, and “is”—added to the bill.

The result was a ruthless process of linguistic triage. Writers had to ask themselves: what is the absolute minimum number of words I need to convey this meaning? The answer was to slash and burn the “function words” and keep the “content words.”

• Function Words (The Casualties): These are the grammatical glue of a sentence. They include articles (a, an, the), pronouns (I, you, she), prepositions (on, in, at), conjunctions (and, but), and auxiliary verbs (is, are, will, have). They provide structure but little core information.
• Content Words (The Survivors): These are the workhorses of meaning. They include nouns (station, money), main verbs (arrive, send), adjectives (urgent, important), and adverbs (quickly).

Consider a simple message:

“I have successfully secured the contract. I will be arriving on the train that gets in on Tuesday evening. Please meet me at the station.” (26 words)

Now, let’s put it through the telegraphic filter:

“CONTRACT SECURED STOP ARRIVING TUESDAY EVENING TRAIN STOP MEET STATION STOP” (11 words)

The cost is cut by more than half, but the essential information remains intact. We see the verb “to be” completely eliminated (“I will be arriving” becomes simply “ARRIVING”). Articles vanish. Pronouns are deemed an unnecessary luxury. Even punctuation had to be spelled out as a word—hence the ubiquitous “STOP”—making it a prime candidate for minimal use.

This wasn’t just butchering English; it was the creation of a new, highly specialized grammar system, optimized for efficiency and cost above all else.

Headlinese: The Telegraph’s Echo in Print

The first and most influential group to adopt this condensed style was journalists. News from distant battlefields, political conventions, and foreign capitals flew across the wires in telegrammese. A reporter filing a story on the Civil War wasn’t composing elegant prose; they were transmitting raw facts as cheaply as possible.

Editors sitting in newsrooms became fluent in this dialect. They soon realized that the same principles used to save money on the wire could be used to save space on the printed page. Thus, “headlinese” was born.

A newspaper headline has to do three things: grab attention, convey information, and fit into a very tight physical space. The telegraphic style was a perfect fit. Compare these headlines to telegrams and the DNA is unmistakable:

STOCKS PLUNGE ON FEARS OF RECESSION (Not: Stocks have plunged because people have fears of a recession.)

MAN BITES DOG (Not: A man has bitten a dog.)

DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN (The infamous, incorrect headline is still a perfect example of the style.)

Headlinese drops articles, uses short, punchy verbs, and often employs a sort of timeless present tense to create a sense of immediacy—all traits it inherited from its telegraphic ancestor. It’s a language of impact, where every character counts. The verb wasn’t just killed; it was sharpened into a weapon of attention.

From STOP to IDK: The Digital Rebirth

For a while, as technology progressed, it seemed this hyper-condensed style might become a historical curiosity. Telephones made spoken conversation easy, and word processors gave us infinite space to write.

Then came the next revolution in communication: the digital age. And with it, new constraints.

The early days of the internet and mobile phones recreated the telegraph’s economic pressure, but this time the currency wasn’t money; it was characters.

• SMS (Short Message Service): With a strict limit of 160 characters, texting forced a new generation to rediscover the art of compression. Why type “I don’t know, be right back” when “idk brb” does the job in a fraction of the space?
• Twitter: The original 140-character limit (later expanded to 280) created a global platform where brevity wasn’t just a feature but the entire point. It became a masterclass in modern telegrammese.

The parallels are stunning. Dropping function words (“u going party?”), using abbreviations and acronyms (LOL, IMHO, TTYL), and prioritizing raw information are all hallmarks of digital communication that trace their roots back to the telegraph key. We may no longer spell out “STOP,” but an emoji or a line break serves the same purpose.

Telegram: MISSION SUCCESSFUL STOP CELEBRATE TONIGHT STOP
Text: mission success! celebrate 2nite 🎉

The spirit is identical: maximum meaning, minimum waste.

A Style That Won’t Die

The telegraph is long gone, a relic of a bygone era. Yet the linguistic revolution it started is more relevant than ever. What began as a cost-saving measure forced upon us by technology evolved into a powerful and enduring style. It taught us that stripping a sentence to its bones doesn’t always weaken it; sometimes, it makes it stronger, more immediate, and more impactful.

From the urgent dash of a 19th-century telegram to the clipped cadence of a modern news alert or the rapid-fire exchange of DMs, the ghost of the telegraph continues to shape our words. We may not be paying by the word anymore, but we still live in a world that values brevity. The verb isn’t dead, but thanks to the telegraph, we learned how to make it work a lot harder.