Back in the 1600s there was a terrific insult word that has, incomprehensibly, fallen out of use entirely. It was blatteroon, defined in a Glossaria in 1656 as “a babler, an idle-headed fellow.”
In spite of being an excellent epithet to sputter at this or that blithering idiot, the word seems to have died out for more than a century. But then, unexpectedly, it was revived by a technological innovation: the telegraph.
Telegraph service — at least the electrical type (optical telegraphs came first) pretty quickly settled on using Morse code. A problem with Morse code is that each letter is a combination of dots and dashes, so long words take longer — and as soon as telegraph service operators realized they could charge by the number of letters in a message (this reportedly took nearly 5 whole seconds), longer words cost more.
A solution sprung up pretty quickly: code books. Not secret codes, but shorthand codes. They listed phrases you might want to communicate, and used a single word to stand in for that phrase. And somehow, “blatteroon” turned out to be one of the words, even though it’s not the shortest of words.
Each code book was different, of course — and some of them were targeted at particular industries, like the Telegraphic Congressional Reporter from 1847, and Buell’s Mercantile Cypher for Condensing Telegrams from 1860. There were dozens of these books; all you had to do was decide, with your correspondents, which one to use. One of the most popular was Lieber’s Standard Telegraph Code, which used “blatteroon” to mean “did you reserve.” That was a respectable compression ratio of 33%. The New General and Mining Telegraph Code also used “blatteroon”, but it stood for “almost certain to float.” I know, doesn’t make that much sense to me either, but geez, the compression ratio is over 40%!
Western Union, the largest telegraph operator in the US, also had a code book that included “blatteroon”, but they just left it blank so you could fill in your own meaning. Of course, before you sent a message you’d have to tell the person on the other end of your message what you’d filled in. Which you’d probably do…unless you were too much of a blatteroon.
