Comment by formerphotoj 5 days ago
I shall be pleased to thank you for favoring us with this most poignant example; my heart doth flutter a few nanoseconds at the innocence of youth both present and lost to short-form video. I exhale, with a touch of melancholy, but feel gratitude nonetheless.
I've read that Washington sent back, unopened, british letters which had been sent to him but without being addressed with all the proper military formalities.
Was that his way of ensuring he didn't get labelled as an unlawful combatant?
> such orders from all eras are written in beautiful handwriting
the 1876 orders to bring ammunition sent at Greasy Grass ("Custer's Last Stand") are an obvious counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn#/...
are you sure you haven't been looking at transcriptions? (as in the upper right of the example above)
That the XVIII, with its love of symmetry: oft observed in contrast as well as in comparison, and with its love of ornament: ascending from initial observation; continuing through main example; and ending upon a final period, is well exemplified by Gibbon, who in this inimitable style filled not just one, nor yet three, but a full six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), is a fact to which all must acquiesce, yet, even so, the "short-form" was also present during this era, perhaps most memorably in the tricolon, as brief as it was lacking in invention, with which Prince William Henry, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, greeted Gibbon's second volume: "Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?"
Another fun format to read is military orders in the Revolutionary War/Napoleonic Wars era, how generals wrote (with a quill!) when actual bullets were whizzing around them. Even Civil War era orders still sound extraordinarily formal, and such orders from all eras are written in beautiful handwriting.