By the sort of contradiction that modern technology often inflicts upon us, the personal computer most “print” journalist use to transmit their copy is, essentially, impersonal.
They simply send a story through the international ether. Sometimes its receipt is acknowledged, sometimes not.
The post office cable, the old-fashioned telex message, was an umbilical cord. It even has its own idiom.
Cable-ese we called it. Because the cost of press telegrams was calculated by the word, and that cost obviously ballooned with distance, prefixes were used. Un- meant no or not; pro- for or to; et, and; ex-, from; and con-, with. Soonest meant as soon as possible.
It was a shorthand that sms experts might consider looking at today.
This genre of language produced one classic story of the Reuters man dispatched by his London office to Zanzibar after the 1964 revolution. A week passed with no word from him. The foreign editor sent a cable: “Why unnews?” he demanded.
Not much was happening on the spice island after a spate of killings and arrests, so the reporter sent a message back. “Unnews, good news,” it said.
The response from the foreign editor came the same afternoon. Short and sharp. “Unnews, unjob,” he cabled.
A threat like that would have sent most journalists to their typewriters to dash off the first “situationer” piece that came to mind. This correspondent, however, was made of sterner stuff. “That makes you forty-love,” he replied.
The need to keep down cabling costs led to some wonderful invention. Another Fleet Street friend spent three weeks in Addis Ababa during a similar lull in news. Eventually, he sent the foreign editor a two-word cable: “Nunc dimittis.” Which translated, as choirboys past and present know, means “Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace . . .”
Quick as a flash, the foreign editor replied with another biblical reference: “Matthew 24.6.”
My friend reached for the hotel Gideon’s, looked up the reference, then rang for bar service. Matthew 24.6 held no comfort for a restless soul.
It read: “But the time is not yet.”
Often, service messages could take on a certain ambiguity. More so if the receiving party chose to read them that way.
Eric Robins, a veteran Time correspondent, was declared a prohibited immigrant in the former Rhodesia after Ian Smith’s UDI. He and I were staying at the same hotel in Lusaka when he received the notification. Earlier, Eric had written a profile of Sir Roy Welensky for the magazine. Welensky was the first and last premier of the doomed Central African Federation, a former professional boxer and a florid personality.
At three o’clock in the morning Zambia time, hours before publication of his piece, Robins was dragged from his bed by a porter monitoring the hotel telex machine.
It was a message from his New York office. “How old Welensky?” it said.
Eric was infuriated. He knew Roy Welensky’s date of birth had to be in a hundred files in the Time library and that the person editing his article could easily have looked it up.
So he sent this message back: “Old Welensky fine,” it said. “How you?”

From One man’s Africa