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I recently came across this dealer sticker - this man wasn't a gramophone seller or even owner of a musical instrument shop, oh no, he was a "Sound Wave Exponent". I love the title - does that make all of us sound wave exponents ??

Jake Graham was one of the oldest and longest established Edison agents in the UK.
I wrote a short article about him for the Spring 2017 edition of the CLPGS magazine.

Thanks ! Great photo. I see he has "Sound wave Exponent" on the front of the shop as well..

I'm looking at the Dingle address at the bottom of the ad. I don't understand the comma between 271 and Park Road. Is or was that the practice in the UK to place such a comma? In the US I don't recall ever seeing a comma in that position. Not really a phonograph question. Just curious.

Also the word "exponent" brought to my mind another word: proponent. I then asked myself a totally useless question over my coffee this morning, Why did Jake bill himself as an exponent and not a proponent? I looked up the definition of both words. Considerable overlap. So I searched the back roads of my mind for differences in the connotations of these two words. (This is a very subjective exercise.) It seems to me an exponent is a follower, a disciple of something, whereas a proponent is not only that but also an active promoter. The driver here is the prefix.

If I were Mr. Graham, I would have billed myself as a proponent: Sound Wave Proponent. That has a nice ring. Why didn't he call himself that? The world may never know.

Looking at advertisements in "The Gramophone" magazine from the 1920's, it appears that the placing of a comma after a street number was normal practice. This has fallen out of favour in recent years, along with the proper use of the apostrophe.

I have long suspected that the lazy practice known as texting is largely responsible for the death of English grammar. I have never sent a text in my life, and if I received one on my rarely used mobile phone I would not know what to do with it.