One night, watching TV and “spelling the alphabet” with my toe, it dawned on me that the jolting between the strokes of an A or E was mildly annoying.  Suddenly, a stroke of genius!  My old Gregg shorthand skills, which I had learned 30 years ago in a girls’ Catholic high school, would be perfect for toe-writing.

The inventor of Gregg shorthand, an Irishman by birth, believed that the slowness of the 1880’s shorthand methods lay in their disjointedness, namely, lifting the pen away and back again.  He developed Gregg as an “elliptical” system where the pen would flow constantly, never lifted up in creating one word.  His system is a pleasure to use, and infinitely useful in the real world, in spite of all our computers and answering machines and so on.  Every day we have to write things down, sometimes quite rapidly, at work, on the phone and from TV and radio annoucements. 

So here we sit, we miserable ATR victims stuck at home on couches, with the perfect thing to learn:  Gregg shorthand by toe writing!  We need something to engage our minds, and we need the time to repeat and repeat the strokes to drive them into our minds.  Normally, adults busy with real lives never have time for this, but WE DO!!! 

Instead of writing the alphabet with your toes, check out this website:  www.geocities.com/shorthandshorthandshorthand, which explains some of Gregg shorthand’s history.  BAsic “shortforms” are the best to learn and practice, e.g. “we have”, “I have”, “in the “, “at this time” and other frequent phrases. 

There’s even a movement afoot (no pun intended) to make such “short forms” applicable to ipods, since it would speed up the writing there, too.

You may all consider me crackpot, but just try it!  Gregg shorthand is fluid and beautiful, a flowing style similar to Arabic writing.  We have to sit and exercise our ankles, so why give the brain some meat to chew on, too!?