How Is Stenography Still a Thing?

What's really sad about US House stenographer Dianne Riedy's batshit rant is that it's probably one of the more sane things to come out of Washington in, oh I don't know, the past few weeks. As representatives cast votes on the deal that would ultimately reopen the government, Riedy took the stand. And hooo boy, was it one for the books:

He [God] will not be mocked. The greatest deception here is that this is not one nation under God. It never was. It would not have been. The Constitution would not have been written by Freemasons. They go against God. You cannot serve two masters. Praise be to God. Praise be to Jesus.

I guess this is what happens after you've been locked in a chamber for weeks on end, furiously recording shorthand minutes of what amounted to little more than schoolyard bickering. Which has me asking, how is stenography still a thing?

Not to rag on Riedy. But it's 2013—steno-shortcuts like Digital Audio Recording Transcription Service (DARTS) services are widely available, now—and you mean to tell me stenography is still an art? Really?

As with so many near-antiquated technologies and yesteryear holdovers struggling to stay afloat in today's world, the advantage that something like writing (or typing) shorthand offers over a robot comes down to being able to pick out the subtle nuances. It's about the human touch.

"Sometimes you need to almost lip-read," Sally Lines, a court stenographer at the Old Bailey,  told the BBC in 2011. "Sometimes there is patois or slang or you need to know the context of the case," added Lines, who along with the rest of the trained court stenographers in England and Wales were formally phased out in 2012.

Did you catch all that?

@thebanderson