I can never become famous.
Not that it’s much of a threat, although if Sanjaya can last this long without being voted off “American Idol,” anything is possible in this great and magical land of ours.
But if the entry level for celebrity should ever plummet, and my autograph ended up on eBay, it would impossible for anyone, including me, to verify its authenticity. No two would match each other, or any other signature I’ve ever scrawled, ever. And not with slight variations, either, I’m talking “Chris Bridges” and “Chblit Bronson” and “Claaaaa Beuuuuduuuuuus.”
As with all other pressing problems such as social injustice, lax child-rearing, and my hairline, I blame computers.
My handwriting has always been poor. I tend to write as quickly as I talk, which is a bit faster than a nervous auctioneer on crystal meth. My hand whips across the paper, oblivious to my fingers’ frantic efforts to complete letter shapes before being dragged helplessly to the next word. Papers from my school years look like hordes of ink-dipped birds waged a terrible battle on top of my loose-leaf.
And yet those are huge-print children’s books compared to how I write now, thanks to that most wonderful invention ever devised (and here I’m including the polio vaccine), the keyboard. I can usually type consistently, after all, and automatic spell-checkers help me catch my mistakes, which is more than even expensive ballpoints ever do. It has been many years since I have needed to put pen to paper for anything more than the briefest reasons, and that lack of practice has allowed my penmanship to revert back to the pictogram level. This came home to me last week when I needed to leave a note for Todd, one of our wizard night editors, after logging off my PC. I carefully wrote out a page of instructions and then, as I shook my cramped hand, I looked back over what I had carefully detailed and found that I could not read a single word of what I had just finished writing.
I could infer, from memory and tortured deduction, more or less what I meant, but had I left that note on Todd’s desk, our site the next day might have been in Italian, or published upside down, or had all the local stories replaced with zesty banana-pudding-and-transmission-fluid recipes. Had I really wanted him to urgently capitulate a Beijing guava demon marmot? Possibly, possibly. And I print! Had I attempted cursive I think I would have pulled a hamstring.
I logged back in and sent him an e-mail instead, for the good of mankind. And I mourned for another lost skill, another sign of irrevocable change, another ability degraded by convenience and sloth. But only for a minute or so, because turning laziness into policy is what I’m all about.
What do we need to write for, anyway? I paid attention the last few days and the only timeless missives I scrawled were a CD label (apparently for Natasha Beddingfield’s debut album, “Unwpijjten”), a note to my wife (“Out to W3lMuft, geyying m1tk”), and a validation on a check, and fortunately the drive-through ATM doesn’t have to check my signature (“Ckrs Blids”) against the three signature cards I have on file to determine an allowable range for picky tellers with unreasonable expectations of consistency. Even the checks I need to fill out can often be printed automatically by the store register these days. I don’t really need to write anything anymore that I couldn’t handle with the right software and a “Deposit Only” stamp.
Conceivably I could be kidnapped and would have to take special care, when writing my plea for help on the gas station bathroom mirror, to spell the Geo’s license plate number legibly, but that happens maybe, what, two or three times in your lifetime? And if I feel the need to deface a public building I can use stencils, no sweat.
My sons’ handwriting is even worse than mine, leading me to believe that in a few generations humans will be born with three fingers on each hand, with delicate points on the thumbs for easier Blackberrying.
So that’s it. No more writing! Away with my pens and pencils and markers! No longer will I write in guest books when I can just Dyno Label them instead. E-mails will replace all correspondence, no matter how small, and Excel can produce my shopping lists. Report cards can be acknowledged with the free address stickers that various charities send to us by the armful. The ever-popular X is still legal on contracts, I believe, and I can handle that two times out of three.
And from now on, if you get a “Congratulations on your Wedding” card that says only “From the Desk of Chris Bridges,” please understand that I spent just as much time, effort, and emotion rubber-stamping your card as I would have scribbling on it.
You have the word of Chblit Bronson on it.
Chris,
You may not be aware of this, but “printing” is also referred to as “formal writing.” Cursive is actually the informal style, intended for quick notes, and lengthy letters to a loved one. Printing is slow and painful. Legibility comes at the expense of slow hard labor.
When I started teaching, I had the same problem you describe. My handwriting was terrible. Because I was trying to write formally, but I was trying to do it quickly at the same time. Doesn’t work. Cursive is properly described as you say, trying to “complete letter shapes before being dragged helplessly to the next word.” That’s precisely what it’s for. We think of cursive as being harder to do because we learn it AFTER we learn to print, so we have to unlearn printing as we do. Try writing in cursive. You may be surprised. I was.