You know the cloud of spiralling scribbles that pop up above a cartoon character’s head when they’re angry, confused, concussed? I think it’s called a squean.
That’s the story of my life.
These scrawls, curls and doodles don’t appear over my head, though. They’re squirming around inside it.
I call it Teeline Tinnitus™.
Rather than an endless buzzing in my ears, I live with the relentless, tiresome sprint-scratching of thought.
Teeline’s the shorthand system used by journalists for quick, accurate notetaking. It relies on a ‘skeletonised’ alphabet that removes vowels and silent letters to build bastardised words from simplified outlines of the remaining consonants.
It was a vital skill during my life as a crime reporter, when using recording equipment during a trial was a contempt of court offence punishable by prison.
I seldom write in shorthand these days. But, for almost 40 years, I’ve been mentally playing out every interaction, overheard conversation and song lyric as a series of shorthand lines and loops, with consonants stripped bare, vowels discarded and sentences reduced to skeletal strokes as they leave someone’s lips.
I can’t listen to lyrics while I work. So, my go-to Spotify playlist is ‘Sounds of the South American Rainforest’. It’s Amazon music: squawking macaws, chirping crickets, croaking frogs. But as I soak up the soothing notes of nature, I catch my brain transcribing “squawking macaws, chirping crickets, croaking frogs” into Teeline:
If I struggle to sleep, I scribble “Flock of sheep” in my head over and over and over again. It looks like this:
A quick Teeline tutorial.
Here, shorthand’s shorn the sheep of superfluous strokes. The ‘f’ and ‘l’ are smashed together above what appears to be an ‘e’. That’s an ‘o’ and ‘c’ combo. The letter that looks like a ‘u’ is the bottom half of the ‘o’ in ‘of’. The ‘s’ shape represents ‘sh’ and the vertical stroke is a Teeline ‘p’.
Stripped back to its staples, it’s floc o shp. And because you understand the context of the words, you’re unlikely to mistake sheep for ship or shop.
So, what’s the ‘So what’?
Is Teeline Tinnitus the sign of a mind that’s capturing and mentally filing every interaction? Or is it a parasite feeding on my focus?
Maybe my chronic compulsion for cranium chronicling is just distraction disguised as discipline. Ooh, ‘my chronic compulsion for cranium chronicling’ is a fun one:
What am I missing while my brain’s scrawling? A key piece of feedback from a client? A heartfelt revelation from a vulnerable friend? Am I listening to the words without hearing their meaning – like some kind of living, breathing AI tool capturing every utterance during every interaction without the emotional intelligence to interrogate ambiguity?
Nah. It’s not that profound. I just love words. Writing them; playing with them; thinking about them. Always thinking about them.
Teeline Tinnitus is more of an addiction than an affliction. I get a buzz from wrangling and mangling words into swirling curls, scribbles and strokes. It’s an obsession AI can’t share. A very human love that keeps me one step ahead of the writing machines.
I’ve learned to make peace with the silent stenographer in my mind.
Many view AI as a plagiarism machine that replicates style and design without consent. But Marc Wilson believes we’re all plagiarism machines, and how we resolve our urge to copy is a true test of our creativity and ethics.
Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a dumbed-down, sexed-up parody of one of the most formative novels in British literary history, according to Sophie Baker. What does it say about contemporary culture?
