Human beings are famous-ly inventive in finding the language they need -- and in discarding words and even whole languages when they are no longer useful. A good deal of the inventiveness is driven by technological change, though remnants of the old era survive in the new. For example, virtually no one dials a telephone anymore -- you punch numbers. Yet we stubbornly stick to the term "dial." Or do you find yourself, as I do, referring to "records" as you pull out a great CD? Or recalling old tunes that were on the "flip side." But the saddest tale of all is how technological progress has essentially killed off a distinguished old language known as cablese. As in cable and ese. Cablese, a variation on the English language, was invented by foreign correspondents for wire services and newspapers in the days when there were no computer satellite systems to rush your words around the world and no fax machines. To send your story home, all you had were slow and difficult telegraphic cable offices. Cablese was invented to save money. It was about the never-ending war between the clerk behind the Western Union desk and the journalist over what constituted a single word. Daniel Schorr, a commentator at National Public Radio who spent seven years in the 1930s with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, says that cablese was born of "constant struggle to save nickels." Since the big telegraphic companies charged by the word, one trick was to try to turn two words into one. The broader trick was to scrunch whole thoughts together in a very small number of words. This was done with the liberal use of Latin prefixes (un-, ex-, pro-) -- and some inventiveness. You could not just put threewordstogether and have the cable company count it as one. They were too smart for that. "The whole art of cablese was taking two words and turning them around and making one," Mr. Schorr explains. One of his personal favorites is a cable from an editor to a reporter who was filing far too many words on a particular event. The editor's way of shutting down the reporter was this two-word cable: PROCHRISSAKE OFFLAY. Yes, cablese could be a form of pig Latin. Mr. Schorr, by the way, believes that one of the few words of cablese that has entered the popular language is DOWNPLAY. Mike Keats, managing editor of Inter Press Service and a veteran of 30 years at United Press International, offers some examples. Instead of saying, long-windedly, "I am leaving Johannesburg and going to Nairobi," you'd cable your boss: EYE EXJOBURGING NAIROBIWARD. Three words instead of eight. ("EYE" was always used in place of "I" so it wouldn't get lost or be confused with a number.) To report that the queen had just given birth to a new baby girl, the economical way to do it was: QUEEN DAUGHTERED. A famous angry cable from a reporter to an editor began: "UPSTICK JOB," and then suggested where the job could be stuck, using the -ward formulation after an anatomical reference. Mr. Keats tells of an exchange of cables between Evelyn Waugh and his London editor about a British nurse thought to have been killed by an explosion in Ethiopia in the mid-1930s. The editor wanted a story and sent Waugh the following: "NEED 200 WORDS UPBLOWN NURSE." But it turned out the nurse in question was in fact alive and well. Waugh replied succinctly: "NURSE UNUPBLOWN." Sometimes, cables were simply silly fun. A reporter had failed in his dispatch to note the age of Hastings Kamuzu Banda, president of what was then Nyasaland. His editor wrote: "HOW OLD BANDA" The intrepid correspondent answered: "OLD BANDA FINE HOW YOU." Anne Zusy, a former senior editor on the New York Times foreign desk and a veteran of the Associated Press, says "un"-formulations were especially useful to editors. A cable to a reporter that read "UNFIND STORY" or "UNSITE STORY" might loosely translate: "Where the hell is your story?" The way to tell a correspondent not to file anything was to declare: "UNNEED STORY." To be really economical, Mr. Keats says, you could use a numbering system invented by Western Union. The number 30, for instance, meant the end of a transmission. For years, reporters of all types, even those in the newsroom, would mark the end of their stories with a jaunty "-30-". This column has gone on too long. I can see my editor punching frantically at the telegraph: OFFLAY, DOWNHOLD, UNNEED MORE, UPSHUT. And so I close with this: -30- What's the word? If you have one, write to Chatter, The Washington Post Magazine, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071, or e-mail postchat@aol.com. Include your name, address and telephone number. E.J. Dionne will credit contributions he uses.