These Kids Nowadays

I love seeing photos of letters written back in the 1800s, especially the beautiful handwriting that people used back then. Every sentence was written in such neat, horizontal lines – a digital level could not have improved it. The slant of every letter was so consistent that it looked like a protractor had been used. I’ve always tried to use good penmanship, even to the point of being a little obsessed about it. Quite a bit obsessed, actually. For example, ever since the 4th grade, if I wrote the letter “e” and it ended up looking like the letter “i”’ I feared something really bad would happen to my mother. I’d fix it so it looked more like an “e” and all would be well.

I still do that.

But I do have nice handwriting and have always taken a little pride in that. I studied Russian and even my Russian cursive looks pretty nice – much better than Lee Harvey Oswald’s anyway.

Here’s part of a letter I wrote to a Russian pen-pal a while back:

Well, it seems that the learning of cursive and basic penmanship is quickly falling by the wayside these days. At first, the old fuddy-duddy side of me kicked in and was lamenting this trend. (“These kids nowadays!”) That is, until I realized how little we actually utilize handwriting anymore.

We may scribble notes to ourselves during meetings, but more and more, I bring my laptop to do that.

Writing checks? Nope. I do it all online now.

When you think about it, we actually do no more handwriting than can be placed on a Post-it note these days.

A hundred years ago, teachers predicted the demise of handwriting when typewriters came into use. Later, they even discouraged the use of ball-point pens for the same reason.

So, I will concede that learning penmanship has little practical use anymore.

But what really irks me to no end is the horrible spelling and grammar that’s used by these kids nowadays, mainly due to this bothersome and totally useless activity called 'texting.' I really don’t want to even respond to a message like:

omg it was like 2 kewl 2 c u

or worse

where u at

I want to call this person back and say, “I am ‘at’ a place where I don’t respond to messages that end with a preposition.”

Back when I was a kid in school, we actually wrote notes to each other and illegally passed them while the teacher wasn’t looking. Notes that contained hugely significant and well-written treatises such as:
I like you a lot
and we actually spelled out the horribly long word, “you”.

We would have never even considered writing "I like u a lot." The recipient would have thought the sender was an idiot and would have never returned the much-anticipated, "I like you a lot too."

Sigh. . . .

We were good kids. . .

If I ever caught my kid sending a text that contained the atrocity “where u at” he’d have to spend a couple of hours at the kitchen table writing "Where are you?" about two hundred times before he got his cell phone back.

It’s a good thing I’m not a parent.