Take A Letter

Long before “LMFAO” and “BRB” freed us from tiresome longhand, there was Gregg shorthand. Useful in a number of settings, perhaps the most iconic that comes to mind is the office.  The boss would pace and pontificate aloud in a necktie while his secretary sat primly before him, scribbling his every word on a pad atop skirted knee.

Few secretaries will still “take a letter;” even fewer practice shorthand, once a highly marketable skill.  After all, in the space between the late 19th and 20th centuries the boss, as a general rule, did not type.  His business was thinking.  It was the secretary’s business to record the gems that tumbled forth from his tongue.   She’d then translate her scritch-a-scratch via typewriter and present him with a draft for correction.  This cycle continued, draft by draft, until he was satisfied with the final result. 

These days, the cost effectiveness of team-based letter construction is debatable.  Ostensibly, his time in thinking up thoughts was worth more than hers in recording them.  As she typed, he could be thinking up clever new thoughts. The whole scenario only has utility if we accept this suggested hierarchy, this basic separation of value and skills. 

Thanks to the Dictaphone, the days of “take a letter” are largely behind us.  And, thanks to the personal computer, we now know that bosses can indeed type.  In fact, some can out-type their secretaries.  We always knew this in the same way we always knew some secretaries could out-think their bosses.  Let’s face it.  The practice of dictation brought women to the feet of men, close enough for him to smell her perfume, to admire her legs, her stockings, her neckline, and all the while she would, as protocol dictated, hang on his every word. 

Today, the female executive is commonplace. Perhaps office skills like shorthand and typing offered women backdoor passage to our most hallowed men’s club – the professional space.  And while he paced and pontificated and peeked at his lovely, humble secretary, she quietly absorbed not just his words, but a sense of business acumen.  She took a letter, and she ran with it. 

Nancy Wyland is a Defunct staff reader and contributor to Ye Olde Blogge.

The Way of All Flesh Crayons

I could have sworn that so-called “flesh” colored crayons were around during the entirety of my 60’s childhood, but that couldn’t have been the case.  As the U.S. Civil Rights movement heated up, Crayola Crayon Executives, huddled perhaps in their multi-hued nuclear bomb resistant shelters for an emergency meeting during the Cuban Missile Crisis, made the momentous decision in 1962 to change the designation of “flesh” to “peach.”  I was four.  I understood neither nuclear winter nor racism.  I recall stockpiles of “flesh” crayons passed between me and my largely white classmates for the rest of the decade until one day Flesh was extinct.

I didn’t miss it.  I was on to other pursuits by then.  A papier mache figure whose newspaper skin I never quite finished.  A decoupage plaque of a dove of peace that my art teacher pronounced clichéd.  A social studies project of screaming headlines pasted beside a naked Vietnamese girl running out of her skin.

To learn which colors have been retired or changed, click here.

When The Daisy Girl Explodes

It's election season here at Defunct headquarters! Those of us who love to watch local Iowa television thus find ourselves subjected to some rather uninspired ad campaigns. I tend to prefer that campaigns be maximally absurd and apocalyptic, so I'm pretty sad to say that for all the TV I watch, I've yet to see anything like this 1964 ad in which a little girl plays with a flower and then, naturally, the entire world is annihilated. LBJ's ultimately successful campaign ran the ad against Barry Goldwater. Watch for yourself:



Questions abound. Why is this little girl so bad at counting? Why is the nuclear explosion Goldwater is supposedly going to cause happening inside this girl's eye? My nontraditional interpretation is that this evil child pulls the trigger by plucking that last flower petal, which she has brilliantly hooked up to an atomic bomb. If only someone could have stuffed her in a baby cage, the world might have had a chance.

All Aboard The Chattanooga

In honor of the, ahem, "release" of our newest issue, I would like to present you with my very favorite defunct contraption. Gentle Readers, I give you The Chattanooga.

What exactly is The Chattanooga? It's a "curative" medical-issue vibrator crafted for treating 19th and early 20th century women diagnosed with "hysteria."

The Chattanooga evoked therapeutic "paroxysms" that relieved "ailing" housewives and "delicate" ladies of their debilitating "nerves." I suppose that, yes, a regular schedule of machine-generated orgasms might take the edge off of stifling cultural norms. "Sure."

After all, an unsatisfied 19th century woman was a crazy 19th century woman, so nothing short of an extended Rest Cure and daily treatments with The Chattanooga would rid her of her desire for something more than domestic drudgery, thankless childrearing, suffocation-friendly fashion, unfulfilling marriage, and second-class citizenry.

And just for "fun," here's one more thingamadoo called The Manipulator.

Evidently the patient would lie prone on the table with her delicacies positioned over the small opening after which a switch was flipped and all her dreams came true.

(More "medical breakthroughs" at the Museum of Menstruation and Women's Health.)