Took my ex-wife, when we were dating, to see Apollo 13. About halfway through the movie, she leans over and whispers in my ear, “Can you imagine if something like this happened in real life.” I turned and looked at her, stunned. “It did happen in real life, “ I replied.
“What about the fire, at the beginning?”
“Yeah, that happened too.”
After the movie she said since she wasn’t born when it happened, how was she supposed to know. I told her I wasn’t born either, but I paid attention during history class.
Then you can sympathize with the Turks who had their entire alphabet switched in 1928. From that date on, only the Latin script was used. Anyone who started school after that date was completely unable to read Arabic-script Turkish from only a few years before. Their entire body of literature up to 1928 soon became inaccessible to readers.
From this picture, it appears that Atatürk was inflicting Latin cursive on his people simultaneously with printing.
I happened to tell my 17 year old son about this discussion at lunch. He seemed surprised that anyone could get through school without knowing cursive. He was taught it in public elementary school.
I enjoy going to engineering meetings at my software company where the table will be filled with everyone’s laptops except me with a legal pad writing notes in cursive. I mostly do it to be a contrarian; however, it does work well for me and I can still write as quickly in cursive as I did when I was taking notes in university classes in the 80s.
To the extent that I journal - I use the iPhone app. Im not doing it so my kids can read it, although I’m pretty sure they can figure out my passcode.
I write sometimes , usually short notes but I only do that because I grew up writing by hand. When I started working, I handwrote all sorts of documents and someone else typed them - but that went away when we each got a computer and real email ( which at my job was in 2005). No point in handwriting and then typing that report or memo myself.
We share all computers (depending on usage, for example now I’m working on one, my wife is watching tv in another and my son is playing games in the gaming laptop) so my immediate family can just open chrome, select my account and read my docs to their hearts content when I’m gone.
I’ve done quite a bit of journaling over the years. When I was working in Saudi Arabia as a young adult I would write a detailed log of my experiences every night, in cursive on airmail paper, then send it to the next friend or family member on my list after making a photocopy for myself. I’m very glad I have those letters.
For a while I used Google docs, when it was conventient because I was at a keyboard all day anyway.
But most recently (the last few years of my teaching career before retirement), I journaled on bog standard school spiral bound notebooks, using extremely soft pencils, printing in mixed upper and lower case. In part because I wanted to develop my printing beyond the all-caps lettering I acquired as an architect, but mostly because it was more delightful to my hand and to my eye than architect’s all-caps. The velvety thick-thin control of soft graphite on paper made it a sensual delight.
I’m not journaling at all now that I’m retired. But my stack of notebooks is right here by my side.
A real crude broad-brush history might be that most US schools quit teaching it in the 1980s or 1990s, but that it is now making a comeback and a decent fraction of US states now have it back as a mandatory part of the curriculum, with more states joining all the time.
So we oldsters all learned it, and a decent fraction of today’s kids and tweens are learning it, but there’s a large cohort in the middle where very few people learned it.
There’s also a cohort of us oldsters who learned it, but have long since forgotten it. I couldn’t write cursive now to save my soul, but damn, I can type fast! I know I learned it because for some strange reason one of those odd unimportant childhood memories that pops into my brain is a classroom with a large chart or a series of placards with exquisitely drawn capital and lower-case cursive, which we were supposed to emulate. And I know I was able to write cursive. But I think the last time I did, I was probably about three feet tall.
Years ago I was talking to one of my in-laws. She told me that her boyfriend was from Philly. I nodded. She wasn’t sure I knew where that was so she clarified. “Philly,” she said “is a city in the state of Philadelphia.”
I had a friend who had a Ph.D. from a good school. He was proud of his Dutch heritage and was looking for Holland on a globe. He could not find it for two reasons. 1) He had no idea where to look and 2) he did not know that he should be looking for The Netherlands.
