Cursive

On talk radio today I heard the people talking about cursive writing. Apparently it is becoming more and more disused. Why? Kids with keyboards, computers, emails, texts. No on writes letters anymore. I'm guilty of it too. When I hand write anything I use block lettering. But not totally block lettering. Because I write fast there are letters which are connected, like in cursive, but it's not a style of writing, it's a shortcut I created while block writing.

I remember learning to write. They taught block letters first then in 2nd or 3rd grade changed everything. We could only write our assignments in cursive. I was duped!! They played us for a bunch of suckers. Here's the tools for writing, learn them, get used to them. They don't mention that they expect us to totally change everything we just learned. Bastards. 

I have bad handwriting. At least I think it's bad but compared to some I have seen, it's legible. So as an experiment I just tried to write in cursive. It was weird after spending since 5th or 6th grade not writing in cursive. I remember roughly when I stopped. I didn't get in trouble at school, I just decided it was easier not to write cursive, and my teachers could actually read what I wrote. But I remember being in the school library, a kid across the table from me looked at something I was writing and nudged his friend. "He doesn't use cursive." Like it was some sort of schoolyard crime. Like he was better than me because he wrote in a way "grown ups" wrote. "So?" I think was my reply. I don't know what he said to that. It's only the initial admonition I remember. 

Yep, I was a rebel even in 5th grade.

The talk show this morning said that learning cursive makes different parts of your brain work which don't get used when typing on a keyboard or phone pad. They also mentioned a story about a couple girls who were cleaning out their dead grandmother's house and found letters to their grandfather written in cursive. They couldn't read them because they didn't learn cursive. Now I don't know if that was true, but I can see how it might happen. I think if the girls looked closely they could have figured it out. It wasn't Latin, just a strange way of writing English.

It does make me wonder if there is a "grown up" way in foreign languages to write like we have for English. Is there a French, Spanish, Czech way of writing as an adult?

But like Algebra, my need for cursive has long since disappeared.