"Something funny happened tonite so thot I would start another letter and keep writing a little at a time until I get one from you which should be tomorrow or next day. Well, I went uptown this evening to get a magazine to read. I saw a pair of scales, it was one of these fortune telling kind and I put it at 'What work am I most suited for,' and dropped in a penny. The hand came up & said 'Raising a Family.' I don't see how I'm to do it all alone tho do you?"
While Grandpa clearly had an excellent grasp of grammar, punctuation, sentence structure, and spelling, there were some words in all his letters consistently spelled incorrectly. That being said, I feel like they were actually abbreviations he used rather than misspellings...
- thought = "thot"
- tonight = "tonite"
- though = "tho"
- through = "thru"
Besides the climate change from Iowa to California being favorable, I think Grandpa really appreciated and enjoyed all the fresh produce. His letters often mentioned fruit...
"I just got thru eating a pear. They're just getting ripe, and my dressing table is covered with pears & peaches, prunes & plums."Definitely explains why he and grandma had several fruit trees on their acreage throughout my growing up years.
TOTAL WORD COUNT TO DATE = 34,688
I'm smiling, because here the "young generation" thinks they have the market signature on abbreviations for twitter. Your relatives were using it long ago!
ReplyDeleteIt is always interesting finding connections in other people's stories... my in-laws have several fruit trees. :)
ReplyDeleteWhat endearing memroies you now have!
ReplyDelete