A woman bought a vintage dress. It had a secret pocket with a mysterious note
cnn.com
cnn.com
Amazing that a phrase like "Confined yesterday, Twins, both dead, Mother not expected to live" was given a single code word ("Annosus").
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communication...
"Unicode — The Universal Telegraphic Code Book" https://archive.org/details/unicodeuniversa00unkngoog/mode/2...
Towards the back of the book is shown a very early 'DNS'; abbreviated addresses for businesses. "Supplies, London" meant "Junior Army and Navy Stores Limited", a bit like a generic supplies.co.uk. "Jowoto, London" meant "Johnson, Walker & Tolhurst".
In fact, it's just bitmapping.
He would go on to say just how common it was to know a child or adult that died. It was just a normal part of existence.
Today, it simply means that Jeff is going to be 45 minutes late for work.
Since I lived in the "surely dead" era, I still react that way if someone mentions someone getting in a wreck. People must assume I'm upset over Jeff's surely totaled car (something that didn't always happen in the olden days).
I am unaware of this being a past obsession, do you have a source?
I thought it’s a modern meme. Oxford lists earliest use as 1910: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/childbearing-hips_n
Even though mother and child mortality is minimized, there are 999 life-altering things that can go wrong.
Take the simplest ones: what % of the population has the kind of mental illness that’ll destroy your relationship with them? E.g. borderline personality, sociopaths, etc.
Easily 5% or more.
That alone is a 1 in 20 chance of your kid ruining a significant portion of your life, not to mention you bringing a kid into the world with an inevitably ruined life.
And then there’s physical disability, not to mention financial burden.
It’s not worth it.
I’m very glad other people roll those dice: I’m happy to live in a populated world. But I don’t touch the dice myself.
16% of the world population has a significant disability according to the WHO. Most of them are not born with it: age related (dementia, blindness,..), serious work accidents, lasting effects of diseases,...
Loads of them can get treated or won't alter life as much in the western world.
If your family history has no cases of mental illnesses, chances are very low to get them.
For a serious learning disability (not able to attend normal school), it's probably 1 in 20. Most of these kids will still live a fairly normal life in the western world.
Also, chances of disabilities also increase with the age of the parents. Best to have your kids between 20-35 to keep the odds down. Above 40 is a lot more dangerous than under 30.
And social-economic factors play a big role too in food, stabile stress-free upbringing and healthy activities.
Sleepless nights and fatigue? That’s the least of the associated worries.
People who rolled the same dice and ended up in the 3/20 group usually don’t comment.
Sometimes they do:
Some subset with a damaged life shrugs and says it was all worth it.
The reason that there's no word for people who lost a kid is because until yesterday every family lost a child. The word for someone who lost a child was "parent".
An alternative way to look at it is that the people of the past were subjected to massive unprocessed trauma at every age, and that made them weaker than us.
One person sees the body and shrieks in horror and goes into a fit of panic.
Another (an ER doctor) is cool as a cucumber from years of desensitization, calmly treats and saves the body.
I’d have a hard time describing the ER doctor as “weaker”. They’re unquestionable more capable and useful. And I propose stronger not weaker.
President Joe Biden has outlived two of his children. In 1972, his daughter and wife died in a car accident.
Grief over losing a child is not entitlement, or weakness, or being spoiled. It's grief, as raw and human as it's always been.
It used to be normal for children to die in the mid-1800's-England. Something like 25% of children born didn't make it to their first birthday.
Today, that number is more like 0.34%.
I suspect the difference is that in the 1800's it happened a lot. You weren't the only one. You had people who were empathetic. Nearly any person you'd come in contact with likely had either experienced the same trauma, or loved people who had. That doesn't mean people didn't grieve over the loss. It just meant that living with the grief of a lost child was normal.
In "modern" times? If it happens to you, you're an outlier. Not only are you grieving the loss of your child, you're alone. No one you know has also lost a child. You're grieving the loss of potential, the legal garbage, insurance, funeral costs, you're doing it either with your partner, also grieving, or alone (or maybe worse, with a partner, but still "alone"). The amount of times you'll hear "I can't imagine what that must be like" help reinforce that feeling of being alone, because it's simply true. It's unimaginable. It was for me, and even having experienced it, still is.
Whether it's the 1800s or 2000's, humans are resilient. While losing a child often does lead to depression and divorce, we can heal from these things. We have an advantage over 1800s parents in that we have huge support networks that are no further away than our pockets that blow away whatever community support might have existed in the 1800s. Not to mention medicine and advances in our understanding of human psychology.
Grief isn't weakness. Grief is simply human.
And this is why we will disagree. What, by your definition, does "ruin one's life" actually mean? I bet it differs from mine. An easy bet, because we've led different lives with different experiences. What you think of as "ruined" may be my version of "it took 15 years to finally get over something tramautic"
What I see in my own grief, and the many, and I mean many parents who I interact with as part of my own support, is that each of us takes it day by day. Some people have a lot more days of waking up wishing they were dead than other people. Some people channel the grief into starting foundations. None of their behavior is strong, or weak, or entitled, good, bad, right, wrong, or whatever subjective sort of adjective you want to categorize it with. Nor are their lives "ruined", even if they're 14 years into waking up every day wanting to die. Day by day. It's people who have lost someone, someone so innocent, someone they're supposed to protect - there are no words to describe the pain. So while you're trying to decide if someone's grief is "weakness" or "entitlement", they're experiencing it.
Grief is evidence of your love for someone, and in my mind, that sort of love takes a certain sort of strength. To love, knowing it cannot last forever, takes strength. That is as old as humankind itself, and not new, nor a weakness.
https://www.unicode.org/L2/Historical/Unicode-Telegraphic-Ph... is an example but from what I've read there were massive volumes that included all sorts of specific stuff.
Companies coming up with their own codes to save on telegraphy costs were cool, code books with random letters smooshed together. Obviously telegraph operators had trouble with this, reducing their pace so telegraphy companies banned usage of non-words in telegrams (more on that in the book I mentioned).
In the book was a loose piece of paper with a note that the telegraph company was changing their billing rules and that only known words would count as one word for billing purposes. Anything else would be charged at a higher rate for random letters and numbers.
Here's a typical telegraphic code, "The Anglo-American Code to Cheapen Telegraphy and Furnish a Complete Cypher".[1]
“Iran?” they’ll wonder, “perhaps it was code for the ongoing conflict with Iran.”
But in fact it will just be someone who literally died trying to get Webpack to work on a website for pirated Tarantino films.
When the article introduced the weather report idea, I was hoping that this note was spy communications made to look like weather reports.
(Maybe the coded note wound up in a pocket because Elizabeth Bennet was joking with her sisters, pretending to be a spy.)
This is rather recent, but in the same vein. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/llmlingua-inno...
This is a slightly better and more detailed version of this story.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory)
https://lauragerold.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-childrens-blizz...
A price that low for something this old, intact, and beautiful astounds me.
> Rivers Cofield also notes that the dress – although beautiful and fancy to our modern eyes – was not exactly what someone would wear to a ball. It was more like the ‘business casual’ of the day, and to her that does indicate it might have been worn to work.
> Chan has also documented that a number of women worked as clerical staff at the Washington, D.C. offices for the Army Signal Service in the 1880s.
https://www.noaa.gov/heritage/stories/cryptogram-in-silk-dre...
ETA: If memory serves, pockets disappeared from women's clothing as skirts became more form-fitting in the 1910s and 1920s.
Definitely not true considering this quote from 1899:
> No pocketless people has ever been great since pockets were invented, and the female sex cannot rival us while it is pocketless.
(as quoted from https://www.vox.com/2016/9/19/12865560/politics-of-pockets-s... )
According to the article, female clothing has just never had pockets:
> Once upon a time, everyone carried bags. In the Medieval era, both men and women tied their bags to the waist or wore them suspended from belts; these bags looked very much like Renfaire fanny packs. As the rural world grew more urban and criminals more sophisticated, people cunningly hid their external pockets under layers of clothing to hinder cutpurses; men’s jackets and women’s petticoats were outfitted with little slits that allowed to you access your tied-on pockets through your clothing.
> Only in the late seventeenth century did pockets make their move to become part of men’s clothing, permanently sewn into coats, waistcoats, and trousers; women’s pockets, however, failed to make the same migration. Lacking built-in pockets, women continued to hide their tied-on pockets, which were large, often pendulous bags.
> The French Revolution changed everything. While the mid-eighteenth century lavished in rococo, wide skirts that screamed decadence and wealth in their yards and yards of fabric, the end of the eighteenth century whispered restraint. Skirts pulled in close to the body, the natural waist crept ever upward, and the silhouette thinned to a slender column. This neoclassical look had no room for pouchy pockets, yet women still needed to carry their stuff. The reticule, a small, highly decorated purse, was born — and like a pernicious poltergeist, it has never really gone away.
To hear the article tell it, demanding pockets in their clothing was an early form of women's liberation around the period you describe, but one that failed.
- A woman named Sara Rivers Cofield bought an antique Victorian dress from the 1880s at a thrift store in Maine.
- She later discovered a secret pocket inside the dress that contained two pieces of paper with seemingly random words written on them like "Bismark, omit, leafage, buck, bank".
- For years, amateur cryptologists online tried unsuccessfully to decode the mysterious notes.
- In 2018, a researcher named Wayne Chan stumbled upon the code online and began studying 19th century weather codes and telegraph communication.
- He eventually deduced that the notes contained a weather report from May 27, 1888 in shorthand code used by the US Army Signal Corps for economical telegraph transmission.
- The code cracked a 135-year old mystery hidden in the dress and provided a glimpse into how weather data was collected and shared in the late 19th century.
Cheaper to send a two word greeting rather than a fully decoded message.
Why did they feel the need to use actual words?
The international regulations limited the cheaper rate messages to only certain languages, of which one was Latin, so the codebooks used that to avoid confusion with modern languages.
(See my other comment and read the introduction in the linked book.)
On average or individually? A cap of 10 letters doesn't really make sense if you're specifically allowing Latin to be charged by the word.
Have a look, it’s a geographic encoding system.
What’s code book? Would love to get one of them.
I think that's it.
> Browser Blocked
> We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region.
> We recommend you use a different browser or disable the “EasyList Cookie” filter from your “Content Filtering” settings (found under “Settings” -> “Shields” in the Brave Browser).
UPDATE: The blocking is triggered by the "I don't care about cookies" browser extension (Firefox); disabling the extension on the site gets me past the block. Utterly stupid move on CNN's part.
https://lite.cnn.com/2024/01/15/us/antique-dress-maine-encry...
I am surprised nowadays, given how bad the trade has gotten, that people are interested in discussing their content.
That extension was bought by Avast.
There's a community fork called "I still don't care about cookies" available for Firefox and Chrome.
Save you a click.
"I'm a poor worker in an Asian sweatshop. Please get me out of this place."
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/origin-of-help-im-being-he...