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[Golfhaus]

I am left-handed, and my handwriting is atrocious. I have pretty much given up lowercase letters - my letters are all caps, just sized differently for when the situation calls for caps. In order to get married, I had to sign something in a manner in which my cursive name could be read. It took me two minutes to write three words. I could barely remember how to do it.

I had a teacher tell us we had to learn cursive because "in high school, that's all they use." No one in high school used cursive.

Let's face it, writing itself will be obsolete in fifty years. Kids will learn to type on Sesame Street. Parents will marvel at baby's first text message.

[colmore]

I think the real test is if you can remember how to make a cursive "z"

Or any of the cursive capitol letters.

Is there a term for printing fast and about a third of your letters becoming cursive?  Like having your 'e's and 'g's flow into the next letter if it can start with an upstroke.

Also mathematicians and engineers always write their lowercase ts to have the little curl on the bottom so as to avoid confusion with plus signs.  I've met a number of professional gallery artists who write in all caps and don't draw the spine on 'E's so they look like 3 parallel horizontals.

[theinevitable]

I can write a cursive Z, but never really knew any of the nutty capitals. Except the Q, because... that thing is insane.

[Golfhaus]

I have a thing where I'm writing really fast, and a word like "the" will end up looking like "tle" with a line going directly from the bottom of the l into the start of the e. I say it's distinctive, everyone else says I just have shitty handwriting.

[AugustWest]

I can write a cursive Z, but never really knew any of the nutty capitals. Except the Q, because... that thing is insane.

It's a "2".

[theinevitable]

I mean, yeah. That's why I say it's insane.

[littlefallsmets]

A cursive "z" is like... if the letter "e" was a 1780s-type fop.

[CortJstr]

The Q is the worst, but the capital F was clearly designed by a person totally unfamiliar with latin letters.

[side_show]

I got a letter from the SO's grandma on Friday, entirely in small, tidy cursive.  Basically it was telling us that her and grandpa are moving to a condo and that grandpa needs oxygen all the time now.  We had seen them less than a week before, and they can call us any time, so it was strange and charming to get a letter from her.  I was thinking a letter, handwritten on stationary, is like getting something from an archaeological dig.  I could understand it, but it felt like there was a lot of distance there - the span of time it took to get to me being only part of it, the distance of generations between us undeniable.

[colmore]

I think there's definitely a connection between the general quality of handwriting and the economics of letter-sending.

Before railroads, and in the tree-stump filled wilderness of the Eastern US, frequently before ROADS in the late 1700s and early 1800s letters were expensive and took forever to get where they were going, so people put a lot of time and effort into their letter writing.

I've seen a magazine article from the 1870s about how railroads and "instant" delivery of communication were killing the art of letter writing and how with the transcontinental railroad complete and post getting less expensive, letters were getting shorter and much less formal.  It read a lot like modern laments.

Once you get desktop publishing, and any individual has powers over reproduced documents similar to those of a small printing outfit, the value of a handwritten manuscript has just fallen through the floor.  Combine that with the way America has shed a lot of traditional class signifiers since the 30s (the strange world where a man making $80,000 a year and a man making $8,000,000 a year both shoot to be living similar "middle class" existences that differ only in scale.) Baroque handwriting has vanished in kind of the same way that compulsory Ancient Greek at upper-crust colleges has.  And for more or less the same reasons.

[theinevitable]

damn, dude, I totally took hell of Latin. No Greek, though, it won't fit in my schedule.


also: I want to wear a suit every day. That is so classy, man. Wearing a suit, damn.

[AugustWest]

also: I want to wear a suit every day. That is so classy, man. Wearing a suit, damn.

Meh.

[littlefallsmets]

I'll take "comfortable" over "classy" every day of the week and twice on a bag of chips.

I'm mixing my metaphors, here, but you get my idea.

[theinevitable]

i mean, ok. I don't want to wear a suit everyday now. I want to wear a suit everyday back when that was basically normal.

I want to wear a suit everyday in an old black and white movie, is what I am saying.

[kellichou]

I use a lot more deposit tickets than checks, too.  I just asked my bank for some extra books of just deposit slips.  Fixed that problem! 

And my heart goes out to ya, Smells (in response to your previous comment that you've realized a lot of these "rules" were just crazy ones made up by yer old lady).  I see that with some of my own students, and man, does it suck.  I just wanna grab the kid by the shoulders and tell them that they're doing real well considering their effed-up circumstances, that they're a great kid, and shit will only get better from here on out--especially once they're of age and can leave their crazy parents' house.

What's a check?

Actually I wish my band would sell me a book of deposit slips. Because a book of checks has 25 checks and like 6 deposit slips. 25 checks last me 12-18 months, but I use 2 deposit slips a month (for the SO's half of the rent) so I run out of those pretty much immediately. If my building let us pay the rent online like the fancier apartment buildings I don't think I'd need checks at all.