Posted on 02/14/2006 2:45:26 AM PST by Marius3188
We spend our working days tapping into computers. We communicate with each other via email rather than letter. And today, as chip and pin technology becomes compulsory on the high street, even our signatures have become obsolete. Could it really all be over for handwriting? Stuart Jeffries reports
Patrick McGoohan's words are becoming less and less true as technology extends its cheerless remit. "I am not a number," he declared in The Prisoner, "I am a free man." But increasingly we are numbers - digitised and quantified, rewritten as algorithms and asked for our personal codes to confirm who we are before call centre workers will deign to bandy words with us. As if to prove the point, from this morning anyone with a chip and pin card will be obliged to use their pin number and not their signature when making a purchase. It seems odd that the powers-that-be have used Valentine's Day as the deadline for their unromantic automatisation project. Who, after all, writes poetry about pin cards? Let's have a go. "Roses are red, violets are blue, my pin number is 3, 5, 4, 2" (It isn't, incidentally. I'm not that daft).
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
That's interesting. Programs with real-time spell check have vastly improved my spelling.
It's become something of a low-key video game for me: if the red line appears under a word when I space-bar away from it, I "lose a point".
I do so little handwriting now that what used to be a readable hand has really deteriorated.
Has anyone else noticed what I have? The "writer's bump" that used to be very prominent on my right middle finger, where the pen rested, has almost entirely disappeared now.
Yep. And solid state circuitry was the death, alas, of elevator operators.
Yep, I remember. And it's been downhill ever since. :-)
And don't EVEN get me started on the Buggywhip and Candlemaker's unions! LOL....
Correction:
The point of handwriting was to communicate without BEING physically present, and electronic communication fills that task admirably.
Alas, spell check won't catch a word that isn't there.
Lucky for me I learned to print well in middle school, but have a hard time reading others people's crap.
Good luck with your book. I hope it's a best seller.
If handwriting is dying, the use of fountain pens is even more so. I can count on one hand the number of people that I know who use a fountain pen, and all are older people. I have found only two stores in Houston that cater to fountain pen enthusiasts. However, nothing writes any better than an inexpensive Parker Vectra.
That isn't normal. The capillary action is not working. Is the pen clogged? Try another pen or clean the pen and try a different ink. My $5.00 Parker Vectra filled with Schaeffer Script ink is still working fine after 10 years use.
Learning to write in Russian cursive Cyrillic long ago destroyed my ability to write in English. My hand soft of freezes -- I tell it to write an English "t" and it wants to write an "m" instead, "b" for "v," "n" for "p" etc. I suppose I could force myself to relearn writing in English, but printing works OK.
soft of = sort of
My typing still needs work.
Are you collecting quarters or is the sales tax that high where you live?
I used to hand plot and analyze weather maps; the bump of which you speak was a great callus there, it's altogether gone now.
Any more, I get writer's cramp filling out a check. Which I seldom do.
Mine was so big it kind of knocked the top joint of my finger to one side; the finger is straight now.
Nope. Just hate to needlessly carry large numbers of pennies and/or nickels around.
That worked! Thank you kindly.
Smacking head.
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