The Lost Art of Writing

Sorry for the long absence.  I got so excited about doing the blog, and writing creatively again, and then Nick's marathon took over, then life took over, then Nick stole the creative gene and started writing a Novel (actually he finished a novel) for NaNoWriMo and it's taken me this long to think of something witty and clever to write.  OK, so it probably won't be witty or clever, but at least I thought of something fill the page.

So I was sitting at the computer (getting rarer these days since Nick bought me an iPad Mini for Christmas) checking Facebook and the whippet message boards and generally catching up with the world and typing away at 80-100wpm and I looked up and saw these beautiful pens that I bought from some some members of a Facebook crafting group I belong to.  Some of the members of the group make pens (among other things) - a craft called Pen Turning if you want to look it up.  I bought a beautiful maple one for Nick (so sorry the photo doesn't do it justice, but he has it at work now - it's a maple bolt action)  and 3 acrylic ones for me.

  

The Maple and the bottom acrylic are from Mr Coop 

& the two top acrylic are from Dinky Dau's Crafts

Okay, so now that I have babbled and bored you, I will finally get to the point of this blog.  I have been a pen and stationery addict from really young.  There was nothing I loved more than shopping at the beginning of the school year - fresh packs of paper, new binders, and especially new pens.  I loved pens of all kinds.  Coloured pens, gel pens, fountain pens.  I REALLY loved fountain pens and then I could truly write.  I never did learn proper calligraphy, but I could write beautifully with a good fountain pen.  I LOVED writing.  I mean handwriting rather than creative writing (though I love that too).  I had really nice penmanship, and I loved to write.  As soon as I learned to type I also loved to type because it meant I could write faster, but I still loved the act of writing, and as Nick will attest my love of all things 'pen and paper' still exists.

The unfortunate thing in all this, as these beautiful pens above can attest to, is that in this current age we are always on a keyboard.  Whether it be a desktop, laptop, phone or tablet, we use our fingertips to do most of our writing these days (the latter two much to the detriment of language, but I've already talked about that HERE), and we have lost the art of actually writing.  I loved to write letters in longhand to send to my friends.  When I first moved to England from Canada I would write pages to my friends.  Of course things would have been easier had all the conveniences of the internet been around then - I wouldn't have felt so alone in a strange country if I could have jotted the odd note here and there to my friends across the sea, but I WROTE.

Then I had office jobs and I wrote there.  I also used computers, but still did a lot of handwriting.  Unfortunately these days I work from home due to health issues.  I make fleece dog toys, and now have started making paracord collars and leads (that's another post), and I keep all my work related notes in an 'app' I can access from my phone or tablet or computer so that I can access them from anywhere.  Convenient, but sad.  

So I have these new pens, along with a huge collection of other pens that I love, and the most use they will see is me writing the odd notes to myself while paying bills online, or making a reminder (if my phone isn't handy).  So they will sit here for me to look at lovingly and longingly until I force myself to write something, to write ANYTHING, just for the joy of using them and of writing again.

And that will sadden me more, because with the lack of physical writing, while I 'can' still write neatly and beautifully, I have started to scrawl and after a short time my hand will cramp.  Then I look at the chicken scratch on the page - equally as bad as anything my pharmacist father or physician husband could write, and I want to cry.  And then my wonderful husband who I truly adore will come home at the end of the day and say that the lady at the Post Office couldn't read the postcode I wrote on the envelope I asked him to mail, and that will be the crowning end to my day.

So on behalf of all of us stationery and pen addicts out there, I beg you to not let handwriting fall by the wayside. Write a letter to a friend, write a loving note to your other half, or your parent or your child.  Write a thank you to a teacher or to someone who has done something meaningful for you, or write to someone someone who needs something meaningful shown to them.  But please WRITE.

Wendy

The End of the Word as We Know It

No – that is not a typo – I did mean ‘word’ and not ‘world’. Though with today’s smart phones, mini/virtual keyboards, autocorrect and text speak you’d be forgiven for thinking so.

I used to hear my dad malign the ‘current day’ education system (my current day – think somewhere back in the 70’s and early 80’s) stating that they weren’t teaching us the important things any more. ‘In my day we learned…’ Well at least we were still learning phonics, sentence structure and proper grammar. Spelling, grammar and English were ‘my thing’. I aced those subjects. Even at a very young age I was an avid reader and had little time for authors who couldn’t use language properly (the exceptions being, of course, where it was misused in context). I was also potentially a bit of a know-it-all with a bad habit of correcting everyone (oops). I prefer to view it as an early presentation of OCD.

By the time I finished high school they had thrown phonics out the window and were teaching by ‘memory’. In my early 20’s some young teens I was working with, who had been diagnosed with learning disorders, bought themselves ‘Hooked on Phonics’ and (shock-horror) their grades went up and so did their self-esteem, and already I was starting to sound like my dad.  ‘In my day we learned…’

In Grade 10 (age 15 for people in different school systems) I learned to touch-type on a manual typewriter, and then in grades 11-12 we got to move onto an electric (with a ball!). I was jealous when the year behind me got to start on electric typewriters and missed out on the manuals. By the time my youngest brother reached high school (7 years younger than me) they were using computers from the off, but I’m not sure that proper touch-typing was taught any more.  If it was, it doesn’t seem many actually used it then (or now). I’m grateful for having learned that way, and being able to type 80-110wpm is a skill I’m proud of – on an actual keyboard…

I managed to miss the computers that filled rooms and required punch cards by about 2 years, but our home computer (mostly for games and a bit of word processing) was a Commodore 64. Those of us who could touch type were able to really fly on the keyboards then. Even the two finger (or two plus a thumb) typists were able to catch up some. Then followed the real explosion – the rush of IBM’s, Mac’s and PC’s, the internet, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, tablets, shrinking physical sizes, growing storage requirements, cell phones as big as bricks, cell phones smaller than your palm, texting and now smartphones (back to bigger sizes with the smartphones).

Language itself seems to have devolved while technology has evolved. Yet again I find myself sounding like my father did at my age, criticising education, society, the young. I don’t mean to really; it’s meant more as an observation. Having moved from Canada to the UK and having become aware that the language, dialect and accent can change from county to county. city to city, or in fact even a mile down the road has broadened my thinking, experience and tolerance for different ‘forms’ of language. Canada is a country that, west of Quebec, pretty much has the same accent and dialect throughout, and while I understood the existence of regional accents/dialects (north, south, east, west) across in the US, the UK pretty much blew my mind!

However, I digress. What really prompted this post (with all of its background – note its not it’s) is that it seems we have lost the ‘art’ of the written word, and we have become very lazy with it. I blame ‘text-speak’ to begin with. Phone companies were charging for a maximum number of characters per message, so people had to cram what they wanted to say into the smallest numbers of characters. In addition, using numeric keys to write words was a pain. I ‘get’ that. I am on record (there is actual video footage where you can hear me texting in the background) as the slowest person in the world to ever send texts – and that was using predictive text. But do we really need to carry it into every day life? Cmon ppl ur gr8 enuf not 2 nd 2 do that. (Ooh, I cringed typing that). Now we have smart phones and actual Qwerty keyboards, and unlimited text plans. We could easily go back to using full words and sentences, but the text-speak has stuck.

I manage/moderate a couple of online forums and read several more, and my OCD (especially with regard to written language) kicks in on a regular basis. I have relatively successfully forced myself to accept spelling errors and grammatical errors, and bad punctuation (and just plain typos). For the most part I’m good at ignoring them (or correcting them in my head and moving on), however I draw the line at text speak. I just feel it has no place there - or even on Facebook for that matter. And reading text-speak from people my age or older is just plain weird. It’s probably just me, and I’ve probably lost most of you by now, but I promise you this is going somewhere.

Keeping in mind everything I’ve said above:  I love language, I respect grammar, sentence structure, punctuation and spelling, hate text-speak except where absolutely necessary, love typing and writing… I finally broke down and got a smartphone. In my case it was an iPhone, though the Blackberry (with actual rather than virtual keyboard) was up there for a while. I was SO grateful for a Qwerty keyboard. No more stupid numbers and hitting buttons two or three times for the letter I wanted, no more having it predict words I never intended. It was going to be GREAT (not gr8).

And now I am the bane of my own existence. For some reason (eyesight getting poor with age, fingers too clumsy, stupid virtual iPhone keyboard in general) I cannot seem to hit the right letters a good proportion of the time. I hit an ‘o’ and it becomes an ‘i’, I hit an ‘e’ and it’s an ‘r’, an 's' becomes a 'd' (I'm constantly 'do dorry'). The iPhone is great, it makes suggestions and has an autocorrect, and a lot of the time it works in my favour (I can leave out apostrophes and it will put them in – it saves me changing keyboard levels). Unfortunately it also is wrong half the time, so I now have a combination of ‘user error’ (aka me hitting the wrong keys), and iPhone interpretation (iPhone correcting words that I AM typing correctly and it thinks I don’t want, or iPhone correcting the words I misspelled into words that make no sense in the context). On a dog forum ‘I live my digs’ can probably be interpreted to mean ‘I love my dogs’ by anyone who has the same autocorrect issues with their smartphone/tablet, however in the real world no one would have a clue - or else think I was making a very pathetic attempt at being ‘cool’.

The result is that while I was bad enough editing and re-editing any posts I wrote on the forums before, I am now obsessive about it. From a regular keyboard there might be the odd typo, or I might decide to reword something for clarity (I tend to babble if you haven’t noticed). Often that would mean a couple of quick edits after typing. Not now. Now if I write from the phone I will proof it as much as I can on that little tiny screen, then I will hit send. Somewhere between hitting send and reaching the forum it becomes pure nonsense. I have had entire sentences where even I, who wrote the darn thing, cannot make out what I’ve tried to say. And now ‘I’m’ the one who’s grammar needs to be ignored, who’s typos and ‘autocorrects’ need to be interpreted, and I’m sure there are people out there thinking ‘my gosh that woman needs an education’. So now, instead of a couple of quick edits, I go back and fix and edit and resave a dozen or more times (while being thoroughly shamed by myself). And it seems I have become that which I despised.

So it’s the end of the word as I know it (and I don’t feel fine).

Wendy

ps:  For a quick laugh at my expense here's a screen grab of a text between myself and a friend where I was using the slang 'ta muchly' for 'thank you very much' (see I can actually use 'silly speak' in every day talk).  This is what the iPhone mangled it into.

pps:  Feel free to have further laughs at my expense.  While I've tried very hard to ensure there are few to no grammatical errors in this post I'm sure I've missed several.  (I did it on purpose to see if you were paying attention.  Yes I absolutely did.  That's my story and I'm sticking to it!)

Very Long & Unfathomably Whingey Irrational Rant Of The Day

I just spent an hour in my local supermarket being photoblocked. 

I had 80 pictures on a USB key of our "Staff barbecue and sports day" from a couple of weekends ago. It took me about 3hrs at home on the computer to wean them down from the original 240 photos taken on the day, and then to crop, size and do some tasteful editing.  I'm going to be creating a photo montage on the main wall at work to try and give everyone a few smiles over the next month.  How difficult could it be to just pop into my local Tesco [a big sell everything Walmarty type of supermarket], stick the key in the machine and hit the "order all" button?

Well I arrived to find 6 people already waiting in the queue in front of me, but for all the difference it would have made it could have been 25.  The wall of animosity directed at the 2 photo order machines in use in front of them was palpable.  It was also audible.  My first clue to this was when one of the ladies, using some very unladylike [albeit very accurate] language announced that this was a complete joke - with sexual connotations. Bear in mind she said this out loud, about the two people standing about a foot and a half in front of her. The man on the left wasn't ordering prints of his holiday snaps, oh no. He was creating a photo book, probably a present. But more than that, he was creating a work of art. And it wasn't right, it... just... wasn't... right!  He was on page 21 ["he's been at this for 40 minutes" - with sexual connotations - announced one of the other ladies], and every page had 2, or 3, or 4 photos, in different orders, in different shapes, he could move them, flip them, rotate them, no, still not right, rotate them back.  Some he wanted to expand, some he wanted to crop. And every time he put one in, he'd look back at the 500 photos on his card to see if he'd picked the right one. He hadn't.  Every single - with sexual connotations - time he'd picked the wrong one and had to change it back. And then he'd put one back in again. But it... still... wasn't... right. 

At one point he put in a picture of a sheep on a mountainside, and I looked at one of my fellow volcanic grumblers, all of us about to go pyroclastic on his backside, as if to say "hasn't he already used that one earlier?".  Bear in mind, we're standing in the middle of a busy shopping aisle, being rammed by trolleys and prams and shopping bags.  There is nothing else to do but stare at this man's photos.  One of the ladies looked at her friend.  "He used that one earlier didn't he?"  The man heard her.  He checked back to page six.  He had!  He HAD used the picture of a sheep on a mountainside before.  How could he have missed it when he flicked from page 6 back to page 19, and compared it to page 8, then swapped for the photo on page 14, before rotating then unrotating the 4 photos on page 15?  What sort of a dumb idiot was he?  He then proceeded to delete 6 pages of photos, all the way back from page 22 to page 16! We stared.  We just stared, immobile with rage.  He shook his head, stiffened his shoulders to provide himself the courage that all artists need when creating a masterpiece, and put 4 photos onto his new page 17.  Rotated them, rotated them again, then changed them all.

The woman to his right on the other machine glanced nervously back, obviously knowing she'd be next in the firing line when someone finally blew.  She had a card from her camera in the machine, and had spent the past half hour choosing from every fourth or fifth family and friend beach photo. I knew this because it was clear she'd set the burst function on her camera - every 3 or 4 photos were identical.  All posed portraits, of the same 10 people, beach, sea, sky, shot repeatedly over milliseconds, all 500 of them.  She still couldn't choose between them though. She glanced back again, sorrowfully, apologetically, before adding with perfect comedic timing "and I've still got 2 more cards to go sorry".  She wasn't sure if she'd driven  the woman directly behind her mad enough, so she pulled the 2 cards out of her pocket and showed them to her, just to make sure.

I gave up. I had to shop for lunch then get back to work, you know, sick people and all that. 20 minutes later, an hour after I entered the store, I exited the checkouts, food in hand, and walked past the photo aisle.  No one had moved.  Not the photoblockers, not the queue.  Especially not the man on the left machine.  Stiff backed, sweat on his brow, immune to the fury of the intemperate critics behind him, he continued on in his quest for artistic perfection.  He glanced at the Page 23 he'd just created, he stopped and stared, and paused, and waited, because he knew that he had finally created something worthy of the image in his head...

And then he deleted it.

Nick