I used to cross the Zs…
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This sounds similar to when I was given swimming lessons at our family friends’ country club, because even though I wouldn’t drown, an underwater breast stroke wasn’t “proper”.
Also for me, it didn’t take.
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My father was forced to learn to print, write and do arithmetic with his right hand despite being naturally left handed. He ended up able to write either left or right handed and his penmanship was beautiful.
I’m left handed and my penmanship is seriously meh as well as slow. I take a camera for site surveys and take many careful photos instead.
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A picture is worth…
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Hey, looks like I’m in good company with the left handers.
I was born in 1964, grade school was a smeared mess.
And speaking of dads, mine was born in 1936, he had the most beautiful penmanship, cursive and printing. He was also an accountant and could write perfectly straight columns of numbers with no lines.
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One very questionable advantage when writing in cursive was joyfully — proudly even — shown to me by a 6th grade classmate. She wrote out “True”, and then demonstrated how one could easily change it to “False” with just a few strokes. I never knew if she employed that trick when faced with T/F test questions. Obviously, one would need the monstrous nerve to edit one’s incorrect choice when the graded test paper was handed back and then present it to the teacher for a better grade.
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I find it weird that this is legally mandated…
But on the topic of cursive, I’m glad I learned it in school. I mostly write a hybrid version, like others have mentioned, because I fell into it while taking notes and stuff where I needed to write quickly. Definitely agree that writing by hand improves retention compared to typing.
But a few months ago, randomly, I wanted to re-learn “proper” cursive so started doing my personal writing that way. I find it very meditative. It’s got a nice rhythm.
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All kidding aside, our school was quite progressive in many ways… but not all.
Example 1: Girls had to wear the school’s dark blue skirts. Any sign of culottes posing as skirts, and the wearer was sent home for proper dress.
Example 2: Boys’ hair lengths were not an issue until the 8th grade when one would-be rock drummer in our class started wearing his hair long enough to catch the attention of Sr. Beatrice. (How an Italian-American from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn ended up in a Zydeco band, I’ll never know.)
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My hobby is creative writing. I do all my writing on Google Docs, because I can access it from several devices. (I once wrote a chapter of a book on my smartphone on the flight back from Frankfurt to London.)
However I learned cursive at school and use it in my work notebooks, which are paper. Whatever damage my computer suffers, I can still use my paper notebooks.
There is a value in being able to write on nearly anything with nearly anything. After the nuclear war we’ll be able to write messages on slabs of paving stone with our fingers dipped in brick dust mixed with diarrhoea. Or something.
It doesn’t have to be cursive. My own cursive is nearly illegible unless I go slowly and carefully. But when I make it look nice, I think it looks very nice compared to block printing.
There is still a kind of magic in sending and receiving hand-written letters. Just the extra effort it takes compared to an email or text shows you care about someone.
Fun fact: In medieval calligraphy, the basic vertical stroke is called a minim. The lowercase letter M is made of three minims. The letter I is a single one with a dot over it. Writing out “minim” is just 10 minims in a row.
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Don’t get me started on people using an O instead of a 0 in what is supposed to be a numerical string. Or even doing this writing code.
Just… don’t.
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Cross the 7s and the capital Zs, I was taught.
It may be that my mother spent too long in Czechoslovakia.
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And if memory serves, some scripts, such as Carolingian minuscule, don’t even dot the i, so “minim” is literally just 10 vertical lines. (A quick check verified that Carolignian minuscule has relatively modern i and j without the dots, but I can’t recall if its verticals are considered minims…)
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certainly the dots were added to the “i” to avoid minimum confusion.
I actually made a cuneiform name plate for my dad’s office as a Christmas present once. He loved it since he was a specialist in the automation of non-Roman scripts. Although he DID immediately get a reference book down to check my spelling.
I’ll just leave this here:
Erik the Viking slave master rant (subtitled) - YouTube
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Well the empty set is the additive identity in set theory. So it is zero-ish?
