Ode to the Lost Art of the Curse (er...-ive)

Today, January 23, is "National Handwriting Day." I know this because each day I start my morning by posting something like this on my Facebook page: it's either a celebration of the day, something that happened in history this day or sometimes a combination of both. And then I go research and investigate it before posting. Yes, I'm just that much of a geek. I guess it's the "teacher" in me, wanting to educate in some small way.

So I started with this today (and the photo above):

"Your handwriting is an excellent method of identifying you or your documents, as well as conveying feeling and personality in your work. Unfortunately, in today's super busy world, for most people the act of writing is slower than the act of keyboarding, so it's slowly becoming obsolete.

I say: let's not lose the ability to communicate more personally! Computers are great, but the act of learning to write plays a special part in the development of young brains, and is a great way to convey warmth and a personal touch to the recipient of your message.

Today is National Handwriting Day. How about we celebrate with a handwritten note or card to someone?"

And my friends, as always, commented brilliantly on it to help me think even more about it than I had just then. I guess they educated me, too. (I have some pretty darned good friends.) And as I wondered what to write about today, I knew this was it.

I understand that times change and technology is often the focus of that change. And technology IS good. Hey, I adapt to most of it pretty quickly and easily, even if not immediately. I embrace it even. But sometimes technology is not always a good thing. Families gathering around a radio to listen to programs and talk about them together in front of a roaring fireplace turned into families sitting in front of the TV instead, eating off TV trays with parents telling junior to "move your head and quiet down" because they couldn't see or hear the box. Do I want to go back to the day of no television? Heck no. I love my TV. But can I reminisce about a time that wasn't even a part of my life and imagine how specially unique and now completely lost it probably is? Yes.

And that brings us back to the cursive handwriting.

It's quickly becoming a lost art; and I do mean art. Each of us who grew up with sharp #2 pencils in hand and that tell-tale paper in front of us were taught to do our lettering the exact same way. Oh, and that paper! With its series of strong dark lines and softer dashed ones half between! You knew your lower cases had better meet the dash our you'd get points off your penmanship grade. You knew the letters with "tails" had to come down a certain distance below the solid, oh! but not far enough to affect the letters in the next line! And you knew darn well those i's and t's better be dotted and crossed absolutely correctly. It was a skill, folks. An art they were teaching us.

And, yet, a few years later it was OK to make that strict cursive writing into something of your very own. You may have still done the capital Z properly or enjoyed doing the little "hooks" on the big S and F....but no one ever stuck to "the Q as a 2." (Am I right?) Everyone who learned cursive handwriting the exact same way also somehow then adopted it to their own style, too, and it was allowed. It's like folks speaking the same language but adding their own dialect. We all learned the same words; we just pronounce them differently...but still could understand each other.

Which we can do in a typed word, of course. But where's the personality in that? The thing is: the understanding is important, sure. But the *personality* was just as important. You can put in writing a personality that you can't do with a keyboard. Sure, you can pick different fonts to try to illustrate it (there's a comic sans joke in here somewhere), but it's not the same.

Within the past year I came across my old journals from college and I was both amazed and tickled to see my own handwriting from 20 years ago: what had changed, what was the same. It was interesting to pull out book after book and see my moods and dreams and emotions just by how I formed the letters: big and loopy, small and slanted, no matter what words I was even reading. I think I would still appreciate my old journals today if they had been typed, but there's something much more intimate in reading them in the art form of the letters that really were what brought those words initially to life.

I heard today that this art is dying. I think I already knew it, but the comments from my friends solidified it. Many schools are not even teaching it anymore because it's becoming "antiquated" and folks now type faster than they can write. It makes me sad, even as I embrace this fact: afterall, I'm typing this blog instead of writing it, yes?

But as I said in my Facebook entry, it got me to thinking. Thinking about, say, folks a few decades from now, coming across their great-great-great-great-grandfather's WWI letters back home to his beloved, all ribboned and boxed carefully up in an attic somewhere that no one ever knew about and not being able to curl up on the couch and read them without a translator two generations older there because they *can't read cursive* on their own.

[On an aside that illustrates this? On my last trip home, I found some of these same sort of letters my Dad wrote to my Mom even before they were married. Oh! To see my now-passed father's handwriting! And in sweet correspondence with my Mom! Oh, you cannot get the feelings I had as I read them in a typed-up, printed-out letter, folks. You just can't.]

So, yeah. I get it; I do. I think the only thing to which I can relate it for my own generation is the lost skill of shorthand now. I know Mama knows how to do it. I'm sure some of you may even. But when I was in school, it was no longer taught; there was no need for shorthand anymore with new developments that let you record or click keys or whatever else faster than that. I now wonder if anyone felt the same way about the death of shorthand as I do now about the death of the cursive hand?

And so I will keep writing, friends. I'll keep typing to you all here, of course, but I'll also keep writing my letters, postcards and journals. It can only "go away" if we let it go away. I think it's an art form worth cherishing. If it has to pass, it does. But I, for one, will be hoping for a slow and peaceful death.