Since I know you're a fan of linguistics (and the vowel r), I'll note that I've done some research into the history of stenography and found some interesting overlap with linguistics and ancient memory techniques: boffosocko.com/2014/07/05/th…
That's fascinating! I remember trying to learn Gregg shorthand when I was like 10. I never really got the hang of it, but have a lot of notebooks filled with practice squiggles!