The Fredösphere

More crazy awe: the announced Death of Cursive Handwriting has the curmudgeon (what a wonderful word, curmudgeon!  Makes me want to write it down 500 times.  In cursive) in me denouncing our feckless afterbearers who no longer learn that discipline.  Here's one link, but google the topic if you doubt there has been much hand wringing over the state of handwriting.

Mind you, I completely get the temptation never to learn the not terribly easy craft.  What I don't understand is the poor confused, lying zitbrains you find here and there who claim that block letters are faster. Obviously they haven't practiced their cursive enough to discover what a beautiful, efficient, and downright elegant (in the engineering sense, especially) technique cursive writing is.  Avoiding the tedious act of lifting the pen or pencil off the page once or more per letter is a wonderful thing.

And I would personally like to take this opportunity to denounce whatever pathetic (no doubt self-appointed) panel of so-called experts who were in charge of deciding what the official style for cursive letters would be taught to schoolchildren of my generation. In particular, I'd like to complain that the look of many of the capital letters are goofy, ugly, unwritable, tasteless, and/or generally exactly what you would expect coming from a bunch of education bureaucrats (the kind of people who spend their Friday nights memorizing tables of statistics published by the Soviet Union).  What's with that letter Q, looking like the number 2?  Why can't the capital F look like, you know, an F?  And, speaking as someone with the middle name Gero (a committee of one, no doubt) who therefore occasionally needs to write a capital G and make it look decent, I ask:  who's the genius who came up with that hopeless tangle of worms?  To write a decent G one must loop counter-clockwise, come to a full halt, then loop clockwise.  I've never seen any other person pull it off, and of course, most people don't even try:  most people have brains enough to abandon the system and write their capitals as ordinary block letters.  The capital requires an extra lift of the pen or pencil, so block letters cost almost nothing in time or effort, and look much more tasteful.

(The Time article linked above says a new system, the Zanerian alphabet, is much cleaner.  Sadly, not even that system is being forced upon our lazy spawn.)

I remember the shock I had recently of reading the handwriting of a college student who's penmanship seemed to be lifted right off a poster on the wall of a 2nd grade classroom.  To be blunt, it was the penmanship of a dork.  The kid should have figured it out by that late stage to break the rules, but still, can we agree?­­­­ He was the victim of educational malpractice.

Labels: Culture, Design