Looking ahead

Way back in 1900 the Ladies Home Journal published a fascinating list of predictions of what the world would be like in the year 2000.

The prediction that really caught my eye was about the alphabet and our use of language.

Prediction #16: There will be No C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will rank second.

Obviously C, X and Q are still hanging around, so no change there.

But the condensed words and spelling by sounds seems very much to me like text messaging.

I wonder what they had in mind when they made this prediction?