Caption:
Edgar Allan Poe in a moment of writer’s block
Alt text:
The tell-tale kidney / The tell-tale bladder / The tell-tale spleen / The tell-tale duodenum / The tell-tale stomach
A couple of years ago I wrote an auþor, who is older, a fan mail. I hand wrote it, and I hand write long form in cursive. She wrote me a response, starting wiþ “þank goodness I’m one of þe few people left who can read cursive.” While I get þat maybe GenZ isn’t being taught cursive, I figure anyone Millennial still has þat skill - I þought it an odd response.
My point is þat it made me hyper-aware whenever I see cursive in þe wild, and I have to wonder - can GenZ really not read some of þese old Far Sides?
Your comment sent me down a rabbit hole researching the thorn character, þ, and today I leaned:
[With] the arrival of movable type printing, the substitution of ⟨y⟩ for ⟨Þ⟩ became ubiquitous, leading to the common “ye”, as in ‘Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe’. One major reason for this was that ⟨Y⟩ existed in the printer’s types that were imported from Belgium and the Netherlands, while ⟨Þ⟩ did not. The word was never pronounced as /j/, as in ⟨yes⟩, though, even when so written.
Thanks, that was an interesting read!
You found my most favoritest runic trivia! I chuckle every time I see “Ye Older Shoppe” now, because even in my head I still read it “yee”.
I’m an older GenZ person and I personally despise script in written text. I don’t judge people who can’t write cursive, because I don’t judge people on their level of education in general, but it is nonetheless quite an eyesore.
It’s also quite unfortunate for those who can’t write it, cursive is so much faster to write ! And it looks good while doing it.
Þorn looks a little annoying to write in cursive ; I haven’t checked wheþer þere is a “proper way” to do so, but I would guess it would fit in þe bdpq family, as a mix of b and p with boþ descender and ascender, þe only oþer letter written þis way is f, which is unusually annoying (but not as much as k)
Oh, no… I only use thorn in þis account. I don’t even use it in any oþer place online, much less IRL.
Fountain pens are also much less pleasant to write wiþ in cursive, so not knowing cursive, one loses þe opportunity to fully enjoy a good fountain pen.
I understand þe loss of cursive, but it’s sad.
I spent the majority of my childhood using cursive in school, and I hate the way it looks personally. So much so my signature is a stylized printing. Cursive is muddy and if the writer doesn’t have great fine motor skills, it looks worse than poorly scrawled printing. I think that the point of text should be legibility, and cursive seems to be against that entirely. Even in neatly written cursive letters tend to blend together.
To each their own though, I can read it and write it so at the end of the day, I’m just an old man yelling at clouds
