Cursive is no more!

OK I gotta add this to the pot, it's a quote from one of our town elders who had gone away for the summer and returned to find that his daughter had installed indoor plumbing in the cabins that they rented out.

He said,

" Why in the hell would anyone want to take a crap in their room?"

Which when heard in the right tone of voice makes a whole lot of sense.
It made me question indoor plumbing many decades after it was said.
 
I remember I had to learn cursive in third grade and I remember it was hard back then but its easy now. My problem is that I never really learned to "write properly" and throughout elementary school, jr high, and high school, it always took teachers a while to be able to read my handwriting. So the summer before college I just practiced writing in print to make my professors lives easier.

Still, I don't think cursive is necessarily dead as I still see a lot of people writing in cursive, but I find kids younger than I am seem to be writing more print.
 
Cursive is a liability when it comes to time and clarity. I dumped it during my final year. With poor handwriting it is illegible whereas print is just untidy. I had beautiful pens and practiced it, but when it came to thinking fast and putting it on paper the wheels fell off. Fortunately my mother insisted I do typing courses with the Secretaries at the local colledge in the vac time.
 
There's a good side to all of this. When I'm old and all the young'en can't read cursive...I might be able to fool them into thinking I'm smart! lol!!!
 
My cursive was illegible, I couldn’t read it myself. So I printed everything.

Then I taught myself Italic. It’s faster than printing, and prettier to.
 
Mongo said:
Cursive can't be too dead... they're teaching it to my second grader.
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I can vouch for the same on this end of the country. Of course, there's still plenty of debate out here as to which language the words should belong to, but I can assure you that cursive is still being taught in the private schools at a minimum.
 
THEGRATENATE said:
" Why in the hell would anyone want to take a crap in their room?"
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Because it is 30 below with a -70 windchill...


BTW keyboarding is about half obsolete now. Many schools never bother teaching it. Not to mention the entire qwerty key layout was designed to slow the typist down. The earliest typewriter makers worried or were unable to make mechanical strikers that didn't bind up if the typist was fast, so the qwerty keyboard was layed out to slow the typist thereby allowing the striken keys to fall back before the next keys were forced forward into the ink strip.
 
Sheesh, learn your italic, copperplate, etc people
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Italic is good. Copperplate is good for formal wedding invitations. Otherwise it slows you down way too much.

BTW keyboarding is about half obsolete now. Many schools never bother teaching it. Not to mention the entire qwerty key layout was designed to slow the typist down. The earliest typewriter makers worried or were unable to make mechanical strikers that didn't bind up if the typist was fast, so the qwerty keyboard was layed out to slow the typist thereby allowing the striken keys to fall back before the next keys were forced forward into the ink strip.
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Dvorak rules! It's designed to use your strongest fingers on the keys you use the most. Get an ergonomic Dvorak keyboard. Once you get over the transition time, your typing will be lots faster.
 
I don't know that you can blame anybody, really. It's kinda all our fault as a collective. Computers are faster so we use them more and more. Then, like any good addiction, we became completely dependant. So now, doing things the way they were once done is falling by the wayside. Writing is becoming archaic, though a necessary function, it's turning into a relic. It's like the Internet, I can remember looking for hours through dictionaries and encyclopedias. Then I can remember using the Internet as a tertiary source. Now, the Internet has become the primary source and all others are afterthoughts (and heaven forbid someone NOT have the internet). Don't get me wrong, I'm happy to have my 'puter and the 'net, they're excellent and very important tools for me. But it scares me at how dependant we, as a society, as a nation have become on these things. Then again, I guess it scared the old timers when phones and automobiles became so popular. My papaw still hates cars and says if a horse or a mule can't do it-it don't need done.

Incidentally, anybody remember the card catalog?
 
I can print faster than I can write cursive. Print is easier to read. More people can read it. It doesn't have confusing letters. It can be read from a distance. It is more practical.
But cursive is graceful, flowing. It is- handsome. I love the look of cursive written with a fountain pen, how the bredth of the letters undulate. But, it is like engraving, pretty, but not so practical.
And every third grader at my school writes in cursive, and does so until fifth grade. It definently isn't dead.
 
Raymond1000 said:
Dvorak rules! It's designed to use your strongest fingers on the keys you use the most. Get an ergonomic Dvorak keyboard. Once you get over the transition time, your typing will be lots faster.
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Aye, but unless your job and everywhere else uses that system, or if you don't have a job that uses a computer, then dvorak is better but worthless and impossible to implement.
 
Handwriting has a human element electronic media cannot match, and still has purpose. Cursive and print both send a message that you actually care about taking time to contact someone. If for no other reason, learning handwriting is valuable as a backup tool for when the electricity is down.


Just a side thought, OT. Does anybody recall the smell of mimeographed paper?
 
Does anybody recall the smell of mimeographed paper?
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You mean the probable toxic and carcinogenic solvent smell that accompanied tests in elementary school? Yes.
 
shawn79 said:
Incidentally, anybody remember the card catalog?
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I remember the card catolog.


I am only 14 and started writing cursive in 4th grade. It was terrible. Now in the 9th grade even the girls say I have exellent cursive handwriting. Besides my print sucks.
 
oli said:
I hope these are 2nd or 3rd graders. I would not comply as a student beyond those grades to such a silly request. It is even beyond silly. After the 2nd grade I NEVER used it. Flat out refused. It has no buisiness outside of art class. If you are an art teacher then carry on. Other wise :jerkit: Please STOP wasting these kids time.
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I think they should stop wasting time teaching a lot of things. What they need to do is designate a portion of the class as ditch-diggers and another portion as machine operators. Just teach them how to dig ditches and operate machines. Maybe have an assembly-line section or a McDonald's burger-flipping course. This would only require wasting a week or two of the kids' time. Let the hoity-toity kids go to private schools if they want to learn cursive or how to speak properly.
 
I do try to stop using it.

And matter how hard I try, when I get really Pissed, I still Talk in Cursive.:D:D
 
I don't think you can call my attempts at it "cursive". I really don't ever use it anymore personally, dot I definitely don't think it should be dispelled.
 
Eric J said:
What is the Constitution written in?
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No wonder, things are so mixed up, I can't read it ether.:D

constitution-01.gif
 
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