Probably a pretty boring topic, but what the heck…
Last night I was cleaning out some old file cabinets and I came across a lot of old documents that I had signed more than 20 years ago. I was intrigued, because although my signature has remained basically the same, there are certain noticeable differences. For example, I always sign my name, John Q. Public. Twenty years ago, the Q was very simple, but today it is much more elaborate. I don’t remember when or why I started doing this. Do most peoples signatures evolve over the years?
Obviously, I’m not talking about your signature today compared to when you were in Kindergarten.
Mine has changed in the same way. It used to be very neat and tidy, just like when I first learned cursive. Now you could probably read the first name, the first letter of the last name and a few distinctive letters (l’s looping higher than surrounding letters, g’s and y’s hanging lower, i’s having a dot, etc.) if you saw my signature without knowing my name.
My writing has definitely gotten worse over the years. I blame computers…I hardly write anymore, and when I do, most of my stuff is in abbreviations and shorthand that only I can understand…had to do a therapist communication sheet today from a baker act yesterday…if anyone else had looked at what I wrote, they would have just shook their heads and walked away from it…
There was a clear break in my signature around 1986. Prior to that time, the first letter of my first name had looked a little bit childish. One day I saw a box of stationery with a brand name written in script that started with the same letter. It look so elegant that I decided to copy it. I changed my signature to a thinner, less loopy, more adult-looking version, and that’s the version I’ve used ever since.
I wish I could see my 3rd grade cursive writing teacher today. My penmanship has not changed one iota in all these years…it’s as sloppy as it ever was, and she claimed I was not"applying myself!"
As a former student of the “Palmer Method” of cursive penmanship, until high school my signature was letter perfect.
Then I started noticing that many baseball players’ signatures were much more stylised and I liked that a lot better than my own signature, so I incorporated a little of this and a little of that into my signature which has remained pretty much the same ever since .
Mines degenerated into a wiggly line with litereally no distinguishable letters.
I stopped carrying cash with me a few years ago, and a lot of merchants around here don’t have PIN pads, so I have to sign my name every time I buy things. With the added knowledge that no one will ever actually look at the signature, its degenerated from a large first letter and a wavy line and then the last letter to just a wavy line.
My signature can change even on the same page. Heck, I’ll change styles while signing. Both my first and last names are long, so there’s plenty of time to become distracted and add my initialing then finish with the signature.
Sometimes I feel like sharp curves, at others more rounded, flourishes or plain. A handwriting annalist would have a breakdown authenticating my signature.
It’s only when I’m angry or impatient that it becomes illegible. Years of Catholic school and calligraphy lessons still have a hold on me.
Absolutely. My signature made a drastic change after the invention of the pin pad. It went from a legible script to what retailers have fondly called “The Wave”.
I have pictures of my signature from 10 years ago. It looks about the same.
I did experiment for a while with making my T look like a 7 instead of the more traditional cursive T, and I’ve experimented with a curvier variation of my last initial, but I eventually went back to writing the same way I have since I started making a signature.
I don’t find those sloppy signatures easy to use. It’s really hard to make the same sloppy signature twice, at least for me. What good is speed without consistency?
My signature was a kind of middle-school scrawl well into high school, before devolving into something that more closely resembles a seismograph than any human language.
I vote absentee. One year, my ballot was returned to me with a request that it be resigned, because the signature on the ballot didn’t match the one they had on file, and I needed to resign it. They included a copy of the one on file, and it was that middle school scrawl I was still using when I was eighteen, and first registered to vote.
I had to forge my own signature to get them to accept my ballot.
Mine is more and more of a scrawl. I blame my laboratory notebooks and having to sign every page I use, as well as signing probably a thousand pages so far in coworkers notebooks (the witness countersign.)