In Any Case

Seventeen or eighteen years ago, in a conscious bid to make my handwriting bearable for any attempt to read it, I took up the habit of writing in all caps when I took pen in hand.  It probably helped – but this actually happened just at the time when my work (where this was most relevant, and where I chose to make this change) was shifting away from hard copy, and certainly from anything handwritten.

Still, the habit stuck, and I have scarcely handwritten using lowercase (or cursive) for the better part of two decades now.  My signature in no way resembles the English alphabet, and cannot count toward any objective form of “handwriting” – and has been the only cursive I’ve written in at least as long.

Over the past few years, with lamentations about the loss of cursive in our schools, and possibly altogether, I’ve spent moments here and there practicing penmanship (though, it cannot be said, not much practicing neatness nor legibility).  In a funny little happenstance, my work now also calls for the occasional hand writing.  Given the nature of our business, though we do a great deal virtually, what arrives on my desk is still good old-fashioned hard copies, and in order to route things I make notes as to what belongs to whom.

The notes being primarily for my process, their legibility is not a functional issue of my job – however, I have used the opportunity to recondition myself to using, at least, lowercase.  My cursive being as halting and unnatural as it is (the physical habit of writing in print still allows for pauses, so you can hesitate before making mistakes), I’ve concentratd on my printing, but have tried a little of the trickier art here and there.

Re-establishing lowercase in my life didn’t take very long, though I do occasionally still mix an odd array of uppercase in if I’m in a hurry, not concentrating properly, or am only making one note rather than a number at a time.  Even with this, I’m happy with the progress.

In my life, I have lost the skill of speaking an entire language (German – we won’t count Spanish, as I never became fluent in the first place there), and it still upsets me.  I used to speak it all the time to Beloved Ex – who, not being a German-speaker, quite reasonably found that incredibly irritating – and so, I gave it up.  And, with noone to whom to speak a language, you stop using it, and you lose it.  I can recognize words here and there, and could if pressed perhaps discuss the lady who managt die Tankstelle or how much I enjoy brezeln und sammeln.  Sadly, for all functional purposes, my German is gone.  I can’t even understand it, spoken, anymore really.  It goes by too quickly – and, in the twenty-five years since I *was* able to converse exclusively auf deutsch, if not perfectly – and my accent was good, too), I’ve lost all sense of style and vocabulary.  Even if I regained what I once knew, it would be antiquated by now.

So to regain what I could has been a silly little pleasure.

I haven’t written anything in my creative output for twenty years probably.  As an author, I’ve essentially always been a word-processor, which makes me a very different creature than those who came, for millennia, before me.  Yet having one foot in the camp of ancient tradition – being ABLE to use the oldest methods of communication not by mouth – has become more appealing and more important to me with age.

As far as penmanship itself – the visual beauty of my writing has not improved with age, but I would say, too, it hasn’t gotten worse.  Jumbled, a little, when the capitals sneak in where they shouldn’t – but no uglier than it was when I remediated that problem by changing to uppercase.  The theory then (and it did work well *enough*) was that writing in all caps forced me to pause between letters – and the same theory has me back to lowercase with faster competency and recall than I would have hoped when I started this project.

The next project, of course, will be to revive and retain my ability to write in cursive.  I’ll never have the pretty hand my mom always has, which she wished I in particular, or either of her kids, cared about having – but at least I won’t lose another kind of language, another part of my self-expression.

I’m curious how many people have lost a language, as I did – or how our writing has changed with the advent of technology.  Please tell me … the comments are always open!