I remember my dad taking me to send a telegram when I was a kid in the 1980s. He told me it was paid by the word, so since he was writing in Vietnamese he'd just join them up and nobody would know any better. Can this be true?
People used to use telegraph ciphers that abbreviated common phrases with unusual words to pay less. The real words was a feature as the telegraph company was suspicious about balderdash, and there was no reason to optimize for character count as it was paid per word (or rather a fixed fee + word fee so it never got cheap).
