What is a hobby you enjoy, but seems too quirky or obscure to bring up in most conversations?

Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 533 points –

Mine would be creating pen and paper ciphers for my made up secret communication needs.

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I was learning Gregg Shorthand at some point just for the fun of it and every time I brought it up people had no idea what I was on about.

I'm old enough to remember when shorthand was a required course for women in secretarial schools. I always though it was black magic and very cool.

Wow. How old are you?

In my 60's. According to Internet sources, shorthand was taught in schools until the 1990's. It's likely that shorthand use declined as PCs became common in offices.

My mom grew up in the 80s and I remember her telling me I needed to learn it too in the 90's so I could be a waitress someday if needed.

I took a typing class instead! Worked great for me lol

I think it was still taught to business students up until the mid-90's in my country. That's also how I got my hands on an old Gregg shorthand textbook. That, and typing (via a typewriter) which was the one I learned when I was in high school.

Had I had a choice, I would have chosen to learn shorthand instead.

I still dabble with orthic shorthand - it's kind of like seeing language from a different perspective.

I just looked that up. It does look like some sort of linguistic research.

I only know about it because of my fountain pen hobby; back in the mid 20th C, Esterbrook made fountain pens with replaceable nibs and offered a wide variety including a Gregg shorthand nib. I guess the Gregg shorthand people licensed the name for marketing. It was basically a normal non, but branded.

Is that how Gregg's remember which are steak bakes, and which are chicken bakes?

Hey! Someone left an old Gregg Shorthand textbook (anniversary edition, if I remember it correctly) in our house back when I was a child, and I tried learning it. Still kinda interested in it up until now.

Tried learning it again back during the lockdown days, but it went nowhere unfortunately.

Follow up with a small description, like a sub title. Like...

Gregg Shorthand: A Stenographer's Worst Best friend

Or some nonsense.

That's pretty cool. Basically the same as enciphering something nowadays.