Guys have a problem, apparently. They can’t, for the most part, read cursive. Therefore, they plan on getting rid of the teaching of cursive writing in schools. Who needs it, after all?
But just for the sake of some small reality, here, let us get real.
Cursive is … hmmm, let me see, it is the lovely hand writing in long sweeping curls and flourishes, curlicues and flounces, creative forms and fascinating comments that has existed for – oh, several hundred years at least. It is the foundation of the books and pamphlets, the speeches and decrees, the cries for help, the songs and the letters, the stories, the truths and the falsehoods … the everything that came before.
It is what we were before the printing press, before radio and television, before books and computers, before mankind was so arrogant that he and she forgot how to pick up a pen and just let the words flow.
Cursive is the music that fills out words and makes them appear, at least, to glow with beauty. Cursive brings life to the nominally dead alphabet of our language and grows more intense as it moves forward, hauling us all after it in spite of ourselves, breathing in the glory and the excitement it creates.
If cursive becomes “just another language” for pimple people to learn – or not – then who will read the originals of my letters to my Louie-Louie Lad?
So very sad. Cursive is the music that words flow upon. (Of course, you said it so very much more poetically than that!)
I used to practice calligraphy — imagine what the pimple people would think of THAT art!!! I wonder — do they still sell calligraphy sets (a special fountain pen with multiple nibs and “how-to” booklet) in artists’ supply stores? Or is that on its’ way to being lost as well?
It seems that in our headlong rush to embrace technology, we are thoughtlessly shedding the very things that reflect the nuances of our humanity.
Wondering how people will sign their names. Maybe with an X