Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Cursive

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and special guests Adam Tod Brown and Jeff May explore why cursive is secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Cursive. Known for being writing. Famous for being loopy and school. Nobody thinks much about it, so let's have some fun. Let podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, hello. Yes. Hello. Hi. Hi. And we are so thrilled to have additional guests joining us too. It's our old buddies, Adam Todd Brown from shows such as You Don't Even Like This Show on the Unpops Podcast Network. And Jeff May, who is Adam's frequent co-host on that show, has his own shows, including Jeff Has Cool Friends. Adam, Jeff, welcome. Hello.

Hey. Hey, thanks. Thanks for having us here, except for Jeff. Hey, no, Adam's a bad person, but I'm happy to be here so you could have a good person on. Jeff didn't want to do this. I specifically had to beg Adam to do this. Why did we bring in two people with so much authentic conflict between them? Oh, no.

What a mistake for the vibes. Fellas, please. We're all terrible people. And I want to thank listener Mav for the suggestion of this week's topic. Also with support from Jessie G and Sage and others on the Discord. Maybe start with Adam and Jeff and then Katie. What is your relationship to or opinion of this week's topic which is cursive i was among those 90s early aughts omaha bands i was always more

of a bright eyes guy but cursive is good also they're a little more Fugazi-like than I'm comfortable with, but they've got some solid records. What we have here is a classic misunderstanding. Huh? What? What's happening? No, cursive. I mean, I'm old enough to have learned it in school. Is it true that they don't teach it in school

anymore? Because I understand why they don't. Who needs it now? Yeah, all they teach now is texting and TikTok. They. Who needs it now? Yeah, all they teach now is texting and TikTok. They do teach TikTok, yeah. Yeah, well, TikTok dances. That's like a PE thing now. That's the first thing we'll talk about, and I did learn it in school too. I was born in 1988 and was taught cursive. It's the thing that kept me off of having all A's and B's on my report cards when I was a kid because we would get graded for penmanship and I always got a C in penmanship. A C for cursive.

Yeah. And I was like, I was always I was so indignant that that was the thing that kept me off. I'm like, this is not a sign of my intellect that I'm not good at writing these words. My penmanship is still absolutely awful. Like, yeah, mine is fine. But I really early on, I think even in grade school, just switched to writing. I don't even know what they call writing normal, not cursive, but it's called typing. You idiot.

I saw it. I saw it called manuscript and i always call it black letters it's yeah just letters to me i i actually specifically write in times new roman it's a lot of work guys serif do you put the serifs in or is it sans serif uh it sounds serif that's too much like serif it's too much like... Sans. Serif is too much like cursive. I put no affectations on my letters. I prefer a comique sans. And Katie, did you learn cursive in school in California?

I did. I think I was probably right at the cutoff. I was burned in the year 1989. And yeah, we still learned cursive at that point. And then we stopped at around grade two, I'm going to say. I think they just gave up. Yeah. Don't remember liking it.

I found it confusing, especially that like suddenly N's were M's and M's were some kind of abomination with three lumps. I hated that. That never made sense. Didn't like it. Didn't care for it. Mm-mm. I was in Illinois public schools, and I remember second grade specifically, it felt like most of the year was learning cursive. Just those workbooks and the, like, rails that you write it on in the books with the dotted line in the middle.

Oh, those. And that paper. It's like the gentlest touch of the tip of a pencil and it shreds to bits. Yeah. It explodes. You try to erase it, it just everywhere explodes. Right. And this topic is so intergenerational in a weird way and in a few different ways. And it's very numerical to talk about that. So our first fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week that's in a segment called, Old Man, Take a Look at My Stats,

I'm Counting Like You. I need numbers to podcast the whole day through. I 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. I didn't realize the voice of Mickey Mouse. Yeah. If Mickey Mouse was an angel. Yeah. And that name was submitted by Tim Bennett. Thank you, Tim.

We have a new name every week. Please make him as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or just hit pod at gmail.com. Because, yeah, this was kind of my first question about cursive and this whole episode basically starts in the present and works backwards. The first number is 23, because 23 is how many US states passed recent laws to require the teaching of cursive in public schools. And the laws vary, but in the 2010s and 2020s, 23 different states have done that and many others have considered it or gotten a bill part way through why old senator yells at cloud

a little bit yeah yeah it is like a truly pointless life skill at this point it's like learning sanskrit like i know people are like sitting there and they're just like well we need to preserve this stuff it's like well there's always going to be like nine dorks that are going to study this stuff they're going to be like you know what i'm going to study the rosetta stone and you're just like i feel like we already got the rosetta stone but it's fine like there are still people that always do that so like yeah we'll always have people that'll be, we preserve the knowledge by studying cursive. It, you know, if I could counter that, I don't think we always need to preserve stuff. No one's like, it's not going to impact anyone's life.

If we just completely forget about cursive entirely forever, it will not. That will be the only thing that changes in our life is we won't remember cursive. So what? I don't care. Y'all don't want to mess with cuneiform? No? Anyone? Cuneiform. Kill it all. Kill it all. This change, there's been a few different back and forths, and we'll talk later about how

most U.S. schools started teaching cursive in the late 1800s and pretty much kept it up till around the year 2010. And in 2010, most U.S. states implemented a set of K-12 education standards called Common Core. Ah, yes. And according to the magazine Education Week, the Common Core standards didn't like outlaw cursive or anything, but they don't mention it and they don't incentivize teaching it. outlaw cursive or anything, but they don't mention it and they don't incentivize teaching it. And so schools with their limited resources and time, many of them started dropping cursive because you don't have a lot of money or time to do anything but what's incentivized. It all boils back to No Child Left Behind. So NCLB being established in the early 2000s and

basically forcing education to be more specifically streamlined to a national point, which is silly. Fine. As an educator who was directly impacted by No Child Left Behind, and then sort of I left right as Common Core started to become a thing. Boy, am I glad that I retired in 2012. Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, when you were a school teacher, did you expect or want cursive from kids? No, I didn't care. I wanted their information. Like I could read whatever they were writing. Yeah. Grade school, like, you know, or primary school, whatever you want to say, they,

obviously you have like the general ed teachers and there was less like shuffling around. Yeah. So when you were teaching high school, it was like, yeah, like I taught middle school. Those kids were already passed. Like we stay in the same room and have the same one person tell us how to do everything. I'm going to, I'm going to make it a law that you got to teach kids candle dipping. Got to teach them how to tallow a candle. I mean, to be fair. Otherwise, they're going to be vaping. That is going to be pretty useful in the next 20 years, Katie. Yeah, and then in the resource wars, you know.

Yeah, we're all going to be needing to make our own candles and grow our own vegetables. For the marauders. Yeah, we all know. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I'm making sure I die before the marauding. You crazy? No way. I'm not trying to maraud.

For what? I want to be the Sphinx that has riddles. And it's like, you must solve this riddle in cursive. And then they're all screwed because they didn't learn cursive. That's right. Common Core dropped marauding. Common Core dropped riddles. Kept booby traps.

So that's going to be big. Yeah, that's called new math. Yeah. And the thing with Common Core, because even though, as Jeff said, it involves a lot of roots of the no child left behind policies that were mostly from the Republican George W. Bush administration. But Common Core comes around during the Democratic Obama administration. And so opposition. Yeah, people said the sarcastic thanks Obama and opposed it sometimes for those political reasons. And one way they found to

criticize the whole thing was to push cursive. They're part of the culture war. Yeah. Yeah. It became a culture war thing. It's so, everything is, it's like, how do you want your eggs? Depends on your political party. Yeah. I've literally seen a social media post where someone posted a picture of, I guess, a fried egg and said, this is what they want to take from you. Who who wants to take that from you? Maybe me, because it looks good. I'll eat it. And then at the same time, this this thing that often started as a just opposition to Obama in general, it has also become very bipartisan, oddly. And so that count of 23 states, the most recent state is California. Curveball.

Cursiveball. Their law took effect in 2024. Democratic Party dominated California State Assembly, passed it by a vote of 79 to 0. And then a Democratic governor signed it. To teach cursive, to require teaching cursive. Yeah. And other states on this list are Illinois, Massachusetts. It's a lot of states of various political persuasions. I would add that California needs it because we need cursive to decorate our graffiti towers. Great. So you can't, you're not going to block letter graffiti.

Yeah, that's, where is your flourishing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you just do a black tag, that's just like boogie. And there's no shading. There's no pop effect. There's no highlights. Yeah, I see that. And I'm like, our public education system is failing.

You don't even paint on the wall. Yeah. Right. It is a thing where this cursive element, sometimes the laws list specific reasons that people want it. The California law specifically says that it's for people developing a personal signature. It's also so students can read letters. It's so they can read historical documents. signature. It's also so students can read letters. It's so they can read historical documents. There's also a few conservative people who have said that it's important for children to be able to read the original visual text of the Declaration of Independence in order to be patriots. There's

a range of American reasons for pushing this, but it's become bipartisan. And this first number might be out of date pretty quickly. There's a few other states working laws through to join the list, and it's going that way. I like the idea that they think we're going to get like a King James version of the Declaration of Independence, where we're going to just like warp it throughout the process. It's going to be LeBron. He's going to rewrite it, actually. Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. King James. Yeah. It's just going to be a bunch of eggplant and little water droplets emojis that they add in there. Middle finger, king emoji. Middle finger, king emoji. Middle finger, king emoji.

I'm not against kids learning cursive. I think it's fine. It's just if you're going to limit the funding for schools, right, such that they, having cursive as something actively takes away from perhaps more useful subjects, right? Then that's a problem. If schools were just flush with money, that'd be great. Yeah. Teach them cursive, teach them chess. Yeah. Your local art teacher is not stoked about the fact that they're probably going to get their job cut because cursive is necessary. Yeah. Right. And it's a false choice. Yeah.

And the next number here I love. The next number is 500 US dollars and a trophy. 500 US dollars and a trophy. That's what I'm going to get for killing Adam. I like just this terrible energy you guys have brought to the show today. Imagine if I put out that small of a bounty. I thought I could convince someone to kill someone for $500 and a trophy from a shop. Number one assassin.

I bet you could do it. Just a plastic one with a baseball player. Yeah, yeah. There's people out there who would take it. Guaranteed. I don't know if you've seen the first 48, but... Yeah. That is the prize for a national competition for students in handwriting.

It's run by the Zahner Blosser Education Company. They give that prize for especially cursive handwriting for grades three through six. And then who gives those kids swirlies afterwards? It is unfortunate. The awards ceremony for best cursive is held right next to best muca, best galoot conference for young adults. Yeah, the wedgie finals are taking place right there. The big palooka nationals.

My favorite thing about the existence of this competition is in spite of basically every U.S. state going through a recent political battle over whether we should have cursive in schools, prize winners of this competition are one of the few times the media has interviewed children about cursive and asked them what they think about it. Oh, we should have asked kids, by the way. Whoops. It's the wrong children. Maybe we shouldn't be asking children obsessed with cursive how they feel about cursive. I feel like we got the answer when they signed up. The odd thing is some of these winners are not that into it. No. Ask a spelling bee champion how much they like spelling. As someone who did go to my city's spelling bee as my school champion, I'm not that into it. I was just good at it. I didn't care. Yeah. I won a school anti-drug poem writing contest once. I didn't

mean to win it. And it was not a good thing for me. That was not a good thing for my social standing, especially because the prize that I got, it wasn't like money. I got a stuffed lion that had like a little don't do drugs printed on it. So it really was not worth it. I wasn't trying to win this competition. And yet I did. And it really damaged my reputation yeah you won the bully lottery yeah i really did cool story nark this was my entry i i was second prize

in a patriotism essay contest by the daughters of the american revolution and i was probably the only boy who entered so that's cool cool. That was a beef for me. I won a leadership speech competition against one other person. Nice. But I only umped in it because if you lost, even if you lost, you got 50 bucks. And I was like, well, 50 bucks,

I can write a speech in like 20 minutes. It's just a good incentive. Yeah, it's great. So we all know what it's like having toilet water go up your nose is what we're saying. minutes. It's just a good incentive. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. So we all know what it's like having toilet water go up your nose is what we're saying. Nobody gets onto a podcast after having been the cool kid. Right. No, unless you're famous. Now you have to listen to us. And here's my favorite quotes from current handwriting and cursive champions of the whole country.

NPR interviewed 12-year-old Anvita Rayabharapu, who's from Overland Park, Kansas. And she said, quote, it feels like an honor when you write in cursive because it's like an ancient type of writing. So it's really nice. It is. And I think everyone should be able to write and learn cursive. So she's into it, but she's like, I'm into it the way I would be into hieroglyphs or something, you know? I want to bully this child. Yeah. Yeah. Like we, let's go to Kansas. We've been to Kansas. Let's do it again. I'm going to, I'm just going to reassure everyone. We will not allow Jeff to

bully a child. Uh, don't write to us about that. You're in Italy, Katie. You can't do anything about it. Maybe Alex can try and stop me, but full speed ahead. The train is moving. Oh, no. Now it's a math problem about two different trains from different cities. And kids aren't learning math anymore.

And the other quote here, this is New Jersey student Edward Aquino, who won the national prize in third grade and fourth grade. He said when he does use cursive, it forces him to slow down, which allows ideas to flow more freely and more creatively. However, he prefers to use a computer for its spell check function and typing function. If he has to write something long, quote, I can type faster than I can write. Who's this kid, Carlos Santana? Slows things down so ideas flow more freely. What ideas are you writing down at that age?

I like chips. Chips are good. The most beautiful word, chips, that's ever been written. The most luscious writing of chips you've ever seen. You can taste the chips just by reading it. That's some salt and vinegar cursive right there. I do like, though, that the New Jersey kid is so very direct. He's like, yeah, I get it.

Here's why it's all right. But the reality is, screw this. Right. Yeah, they're not that geeky about about cursive they're not like it's magic and talking in the voice of that martin kid from the simpsons they're like this is okay and i won the contest yeah i i do like yeah it'd be like a kid winning a jump rope competition they're like what do you think he's like i'd rather be playing fortnight like yes i wish my parents would let me play fortnight because a lot of that also has to do it with like i wish my parents would let me play Fortnite. Because a lot of that also has to do with like, I wish my parents would let me be a normal child. Yeah. And yeah, and these testimonials from Cursive

Champions, it fits the very limited amount of scientific study of how fast kids write in cursive. The next number here is 2013, because that's one of the few years when there's been an interesting scientific study of cursive writing speeds for kids. No rush. Yeah. According to science writer Philip Ball, writing for Nautilus magazine, there's very little like strong science on cursive. There's especially like fuzzy stuff about the neurological impact that the internet

is passing around. But for decades, if not centuries, we've just been doing it without checking if it has very much impact on kids learning or thinking. Who gives a shit? Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But like, why do we care about, do you think we're going to be like, oh, it turns out that cursive ruins children's brains forever? Yeah. There's like blog posts that say that or say the opposite. Oh, are there?

Yeah, I guess like if there was something about, if it was like cursive was the key to unlocking some kind of neurological blossoming in children, right? Like maybe you'd want to do more cursive. I find it unlikely that that would be the case, but nevertheless, if you get a grant to do your research, man, that grand money talks. True. Grant scams. Big cursive.

Yeah. In particular, it's hard to study cursive in kids because most places have kind of the same school system in a wide region. And so you can't get like separate control group and test group of kids very easily. Isn't there also like ethics about having children be control groups in anything? Yeah. Yeah. I don't see how that passes the IRB because of exposing children to dangerous levels of cursive. exposing children to dangerous levels of cursive. So like one of the few relatively useful studies we have of cursive, it was in 2013, it was teams at a French university and a university in Quebec, Canada.

Which is French. Yeah, they realized that they can just get relatively different big populations of kids because in France, the educational system is rigid about teaching cursive. And in Canada, teachers can either teach manuscript letters or cursive letters first. And so they measured students who primarily speak and write French and measured their writing speeds in those two places. Interestingly, they found cursive was slower than like block letters, manuscript. And then also the fastest speed was neither of those things. The fastest was any students who developed a personalized mix of cursive and manuscript

as they aged into later grades and just did whatever they wanted. That's what I did. It makes the most sense. I got in so much trouble for that. Also, it that's what i did it makes the most sense i got in so much trouble for that yeah also depending on the age like cursive is a relearned form of writing so a lot of times kids have to concentrate on it which sure like testing it on kids would be you you'd kind of have to test it on like 19 year olds in the same area because like you they have to have an established set of comfort with the style of writing there's a lot of confounding factors if you're like learning cursive up until like fourth grade for example and you're like all right third graders let's see how fast you're writing

cursive it's like well they're still learning it yeah yeah and this personalized mix is probably mostly older kids who are just faster at writing because they're better at everything you know it's it's it's an interesting and still very difficult thing to study. And according to Corinne Harmon James, associate professor at Indiana University in psychology and brain sciences, they say, quote, there is no conclusive evidence that there's a benefit for learning cursive for a child's cognitive development. We just kind of decided kids should learn it and have not really checked and have not found anything super positive either. Some jowly senator decided that every kid had to learn it,

even though all their kids are like 50. I wonder if part of it is just, you know, the jealousy of younger generations having it easier, where we had to learn cursive and we hated it. And these kids think they can just get away with not doing something that we had to learn cursive and we hated it. And these kids think they can just get away with not doing something that we had to do that was mildly unpleasant. Yeah, if there's a political divide, it doesn't seem to be the parties so much. It seems to be ages and generations.

And kind of frat rush hazing logic, maybe. Like we went through that. So you get this dumped on you too. Technology and change. It leads us into one of the few super solid things we do know about the progression of cursive because takeaway number one, the biggest technological change that's pushed us away from wanting to write in cursive was the invention of modern ballpoint pens. Like this usually gets blamed on typing or digital media or TikTok

just because TikTok's the funny thing in that list. But it's really a style of ballpoint pen that really got going in the 1940s. It's less comfortable to write cursive that way. Is it Bic? Yeah, especially the Bick company is one of the big pushers yeah you got always got a fault you know it's always comes down to bick honestly yeah everything bicks good old bick you got any bicks yeah can be traced back to bicks you got it yeah you got to write you got to light something on fire you got to pull hair off of skin

bick yeah bick big bick yeah big Bic energy they're trying to pervert the natural course of events which is for us to write in swirly lettering and to be hairy yeah or shave with a big knife like a crocodile d-knife

I would add too that cursive especially in ink is really awful if you're left-handed yes because you kind of

just like sweep your hand across. And when I do that, I'm always back and I'm like, oh, oh, my hand is gross now. Yeah, that's the thing. The key sources here are a piece for the Object Lessons series at The Atlantic by Josh Giesbrecht and a piece for Hackaday.com by Christina Panos. And they talk about how before we had ballpoint pens, we used quills and small brushes and other ink delivery systems for doing a lot of writing. And then it really took off with the invention of the modern

fountain pen, which has a container of ink inside. And you just glide across paper with especially a fountain pen. You can also like accidentally dribble ink if you're picking up the pen a lot. And you can also like accidentally dribble ink if you're picking up the pen a lot. And so you basically only want to write cursive if you're using a fountain pen or another very ink on a tip kind of system like that. And see, I want to go back to the days when writing required us to hurt a bird a little bit because birds don't do it for me. I don't I'm not a fan. I do like that. Yeah. That's why geese are so mad. Yeah. I don't, I'm not a fan. I do like that, yeah. That's why geese are so mad.

Yeah, I think, sorry, duck, I got to write something. Like quack out. Really giving it to the local pheasant population because I got to write a manuscript. Yep, yep. Yeah, and fountain pens especially, but quills, brushes, other stuff before that, it led to many societies and cultures using cursive in a way we'll talk about later. But ballpoint pens first experimented with in

the late 1800s. And if folks have especially heard the past siff about ball bearings, we talk about how in the 1940s, people developed better ball bearings and better ink chemistry to make a ballpoint pen. And those became the cheap and go-to pen for most people by the 1960s. Have you ever seen like a close-up video of a ballpoint pen working? Oh, yeah. Oh, it's smooth as hell. I can watch. That's my pornography.

Yeah, I can watch stuff like that all day. And ballpoint pens are the main pen now because they have many advantages over a fountain pen. They leak much, much less. Fountain pens need lots of refilling. The ink in fountain pens tends to smudge very easily because it's designed to fall out of the pen. And like Jeff said, it's especially bad if you're left-handed. Left-handed people have been tormented by especially fountain pens. And ballpoint pens are one of the least expensive items in modern history.

Like over time, they are amazingly cheap. Apparently in 1959, the Bic Pen Company sold the crystal pen for just 19 cents in the money of 1959. And that price number has stayed pretty much the same with inflation, which is bonkers. It's like if a Coke still cost five cents is ballpoint pens. They also just appear. You don't actually have to buy a ballpoint pen. Yes. They will sort of accumulate.

I think that they might breed a little bit. There might be some sexual reproduction going on between the ballpoint pens. might be some sexual reproduction going on between the ballpoint pens. Because like, I swear, like I've, I've only bought intentionally bought a ballpoint pen maybe like once or twice in my life. And yet I have hundreds. Yeah. It's banks and breeding. That's how they propagate. I watched a true crime documentary recently, and I don't even remember which one it was, but the woman who was the investigative journalist behind it, they kept showing her taking notes and she was using a fountain pen. And I feel like that was the whole point of them showing her taking notes was, Ooh, look at this fancy pen. Like it had,

she had a case for it and they just, and it was so distracting. It's like, just type already. Come on. Yeah, it's very old-fashioned now. And less than 100 years ago, it was how most people wrote. And the thing is, like, ballpoint pens are definitely here to stay unless something even better comes along. But the one advantage of fountain pens, really, is that you didn't need to do a lot of hand pressure to make a mark. It was much easier than a ballpoint pen or a pencil to make marks. And the thing is, we're stuck with the primary downside of the hand tiringness of ballpoint

pen pressure making. And according to handwriting expert and typeface designer Rosemary Sassoon, we pretty much use a hand grip for fountain pens still. That's so much better of a name. Are we just going to gloss past the Sassoon brand? I was going to fountain pen right by it. Rosemary Sassoon is a beautiful name, and that is the name I would expect someone who is a handwriting specialist to have. Can you imagine her signature? Yeah, so many S's and O's.

It's just, yeah, it's like that kid writing chips. And no tangles in her hair. I see that signature written up close with like a macro photography of a ballpoint pen. Put that in the distracting background of the documentary, right? There we go. But so yeah, we're using a grip that's designed mostly for a flowing, easy mark with a pen where you have to press a lot. And so we're kind of wearing out our hands.

And with ballpoint pens, we should do the minimum amount of marks, not that flowing ligatures between all the letters cursive. Your number's up, birds. We're coming for you. I mean, I remember as a kid, I had developed a specific way to hold my pen that was the most comfortable. And I was told over and over, don't hold your pen like that. Yeah, me too. But even though it was more comfortable i think it worked better and then eventually yeah it was like i was i i was

convinced through much cajoling to change how i held my pen to be the right way and it's worse yeah yeah there's a there's a comic book artist named eric larson he's one of the founders of image comics and creators a creator of savage dragon famously drew a bunch of spider-man stuff and he draws he's like like a legendary artist he draws like a machine he like puts his hand up in a claw and the pencil kind of goes down in between where his fingers meet and he like uses his whole arm to draw and it is the most unhinged thing to watch but it clearly is successful and easier for him to do it that way yeah yeah yeah when i was a kid i initially wrote with my left hand and the monsters teaching me to write forced me to write with my right hand. So when I hold a pen, instead of the top of it pointing to the right,

it still points to the left like it would when I was holding it with my left hand. So I like kind of hold it backwards and I've just always kept that my entire life. Wow. It's so strange just like how we're like, nope, don't write with that hand. We won't allow it. You can't do it. It's a bit rude. It's not like we're throwing baseballs. Like our arms are developed enough to write however we want. Yeah. And have to get Tommy John surgery right that way. Yeah. And this is all kind of the secret reason that a lot of people are not consciously

aware of even that a lot of us don't want to use cursive is that there are a bunch of made up rules about hand postures that nobody checked about combined with a tool that's not really optimal for cursive. And so when most people are in that scenario, they are eventually doing a jailbreak for themselves of like, well, I'm just not going to do this anymore. And that's really why cursive is going away. It's not computers. That's sort of a secondary reason. You're not computers.

Got him. Your face isn't a computer. And, folks, that's our first huge takeaway and a ton of numbers. We're going to take a quick break, then come back with more takeaways about the original origins of world cursives. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places. Yes, I'm going to manifest and roam. All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR.

hello teachers and faculty this is janet varney i'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast the jv club with janet varney is part of the curriculum for the school year learning about the teenage years of such guests as allison brie vicky Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience. One you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And folks, we're back. And our next big takeaway is a mega takeaway number two.

Many centuries of cursive styles developed as specific cultural and national styles and statements. Like a lot of cursives were particular to countries or art forms. Okay. That's obnoxious. Pretty dumb. Yeah. Yeah. I don't like that at all.

Alex, yes, and it's dumb. Good UCP. And this mega takeaway, it's got a ton of sources, including a book called Palimpsest, A History of the Written Word by Harvard researcher Matthew Battles. And also a book called The Golden Thread, The Story of Writing by University of Sunderland professor Ewan Clayton. And cursive is truly global. We can't cover all the different cultures and peoples that have done it. They all did it because they pretty much had ink. and it just makes sense to keep the lines together. We could do it if you weren't a coward. Yeah.

One example developed in the early 200s AD in China, people developed the first cursive scripts for languages like Mandarin. And the old Chinese name for this translates to grass scripts, and it was refined across a few dynasties. And it simplified the strokes of existing characters. For example, the word chrysanthemum, instead of writing two whole characters made of 20 strokes, you could do one very expressive and continuous motion for that whole thing. So a lot of cultures have made a cursive. It's not just a Latin alphabet thing. I'm glad someone finally addressed that problem.

Yeah. Bring it into the big. The santham has had too much power for too long. Yeah. I've actually not written the word in a long time because of that. But hearing you say this now, I might go back to it. I'm afraid to even say that word.

Yeah. Chris. You say it. It's so close. I'm afraid to even say that word. Yeah. Chrysanthemum. You say it. Chrysanthemum. You're so close. It's a tough one. It's a tough one. The good news is that the local senates have decided that the word chrysanthemum will be taught in all classes.

Chrysanthemum is a very good, ever clear, deep album cut. But I think everyone knew that. Chrysanthemum. good, ever clear, deep album cut. But I think everyone knew that. In just every way we want to do less labor expressing ourselves as humans. It's such, it's everything, speaking, writing. And yeah, and the Latin alphabet from like Latin language Roman times, they started doing cursive versions of it. And that's also where we get the word cursive. It's from the Latin verb curere, which is the verb for running. And yeah, in the ancient Romans, they used big, tall capital letters for their most elaborate stone inscriptions, and then progressively more casual and cursive letters for correspondence and documents. And the ancient Greeks did that too.

This is another way Roman-Greece cultures connected. It's like a date. Start strong, big first date, and then you just kind of slop your way through the rest of it. Way to go, Rome. They had like fast food. I visited Pompeii and they'd have like fast food stalls, ancient ones. And apparently they would have pictures of the food sometimes. So I imagine some of them would have like logos with stylized lettering. Yeah. You're like, I'm going to have I, I, I hot dogs, please.

And then we pretty much get to what I think of as like American cursive through a few more developments in Europe. I think of as like American cursive through a few more developments in Europe. One is that the Roman Empire collapses and then you have kingdoms and the Catholic Church, mostly running society and organizing things. And a Frankish king named Charlemagne, who becomes the Holy Roman Emperor. I taught about him. Yeah, he had a really weirdly big impact for being kind of forgotten. It was just long ago.

I mean, he's still got descendants on the radio in New York right now, Charlemagne the God. Was he one of the ones with the chins or is that other guys? He had a chin. Are you thinking of the Habsburgs? Oh, okay. The Habsburgs were the Holy Roman Emperors who had the chins, but that wasn't – there was no real power at first in that title it was it was whatever but it's all in the chin yeah but when you talk that was a powerful we're talking then the mccoysbergs were opposed to the hatsbergs

and one thing that was developed by charlemagne and his era was a way of writing called Carolingian minuscule, which was a extremely formal form of writing that's not cursive. The letters are separated. But that ended up kind of promoting cursive because then people would do their official writing in Carolingian minuscule. And then whenever they relaxed, they did stuff like cursive. So that made cursive kind of more popular. And they were kicking back. How do you even sell someone on that? If someone came up to me and was like, hey, you want to add a new way of writing to your life?

I would punch you in the stomach. Get away from me. Legitimately, it was partly the force of kings. And legitimately, it was partly the force of like kings and also not that many people were literate. And some of the ones who were were monks who were down for a lot of pain and sacrifice in other ways. And so they did extremely elaborate writing. Yeah, they were illuminating manuscripts. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And then there's an increasing amount of people beginning to be more literate and write. And from there, we start getting more cursive. And this all comes to a point in Renaissance Italy. Hey. And beginning in the 1300s AD, but really in the 1400s, Italian writers start saying, hey, what if we do a new cursive script that's also fancy? And they start to combine some ancient Roman roman letters and some carolingian scripts and one of them has an idea that you can make carolingian more cursive and connected if you slant the letters if you put them on a tilt okay okay way to add your own slant they were just trying to they were just just on Pisa, you know, the Tower of Pisa.

Turned out all slanted. Tower of Pisa. I'm not familiar. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry, Jeff. You might know it as the Tower of Pizza. Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes.

Oh, huge fan. Thank you for translating, Katie. I love the Tower of Pizza. Chrysanthemum. She did it twice. Do you think this has anything to do with the declining power of the church at the time, especially in Rome, where the papacy had moved to Avignon at that point in time, and then with the plague really knocking out people's faith in the church, that it ended up shifting to a more of the people written language?

A bit, yeah. Yeah, this was especially part of people going out and exploring science and new ideas was that so many people had just died of the plague and society was unsettled. I'm not a fan of the science and new ideas, by the way. I'm just asking. You're just a fan of the plague. Just way into the plague. Who's not? Just way into the flick.

Who's not? But then the slanted letters here, they said, hey, I can make Carolingian cursive if they tilt. Right? Like then the right side of a letter leans into the left side of the next letter. That gets its own mini takeaway number three. Italics started out as an iconic cursive from Italy. None of this had ever crossed my mind. Italics are named after Italy and from this.

Yeah, I feel like you could just move on after saying that. Where everybody that just heard that fact just goes, oh, yeah, that makes sense. And then just move on. From the word Italy. The particular innovator was a Florentine scholar in Northern Italy named Niccolo Niccoli. It's just a fun name too. Niccolodian Studios.

Yeah, that's cursive is where italics come from. And it was people saying, let's do an easy and classical script to celebrate ancient Roman culture and also be Renaissance people. And they were so popular, they survived the transition to block printing. In 1501, an Italian printer named Aldus Minutius cut the first metal block letters for italic letters. And he wanted to do it to print the words of the ancient Roman poet Virgil, so he wanted a classical vibe. And he attempted to print the words of the ancient Roman poet Virgil, so he wanted a classical vibe. And he attempted to print the block letters so they would interconnect like cursive. But as time went on, people separated them. And now italics are just a different shape for our separate manuscript printed letters.

Jeff is raising his hand. Go ahead, Jeff. More like virgin. Okay. Oh, wow. Wow, that was worth the hand okay yeah that's what i get calling on jeff imagine being alive back in that time and having to figure out problems like this like how how do we get some of the text to stand out from the other text and a hundred years later, someone's like, what if we give it a little a slant? And they're like, mind blown.

What? A slant? Before then, yeah. Before then, they were like, what if we drew a winged penis in the margin? Also a good idea, though. Fascinums. Yeah. Like also something that I took with me

into my high school experience. So that is a classic existence. You kids, you zoomers and you alphas think you're new with your little penis doodles. I'm sorry. These have been around since ancient Rome and before then. Ancient Greece. Kilroy was here and he's got a honking winged dong flying around. Kilroy was here and he's got a honking winged dong flying around.

Gilgamesh was scrawling dongs into the something associated with Gilgamesh. I don't actually know. Corn, maybe? Corn. Into the corn, yeah. Gilgamesh's corn hogs are very famous throughout history. The band Corn. Corn with a K.

Big music episode. Anyway, yeah. And so italics, they started out as a distinctive cursive of northern Italy in the Renaissance. And the last thing here is that some other cursives also attempted to be specific cursives of their country in Europe. a French printer named Robert Grandjean developed metal forms for a cursive-looking typeface that he called Civilleté and tried to make the national font of France. He was like, not only did I make this, we should print everything French in this and have a distinctive French cursive. Starting to understand the guillotine, starting to get it. The balls on that man to be like, I created this new form of writing. What if perhaps everybody decided to write in it? What if we printed,

I don't know, everything with it? Maybe I get like a small frank every time somebody does it, who knows? He was less successful than other guys in Germany who did Gothic scripts with cursive ligatures between them. Unfortunately for them, those became a general set of fonts that we call Fracture that then got really strongly associated with the Nazis and are now a white nationalist font. And I'm not great. All roads. I could see where that was going. All roads in German history lead to this one very, very important point. And then there. in German history lead to this one very,

very important point. Yet another thing that the Nazis ruined. The little mustache, the swastika, and this cursive. We had an accounting teacher in my high school that did not let Hitler ruin that mustache for him. Oh, no. He kept the toothbrush.

I had a childhood hero who didn't let Hitler ruin that mustache for him. Michael Jordan. That would be Michael Jordan. What a bold choice. He's the Michael Jordan of trying to bring back the Hitler mustache. It's the ultimate statement of confidence in your skill that the people will still support you. Just him watching the History Channel and watching a Hitler thing and being like, and I took that personally.

And another country here is Britain, which developed multiple cursives for different economic classes. Those are boiled letters, actually. Yeah. And they had one called Secretary Hand that was mainly for people in business and assisting businessmen. Then they developed a style called Round Hand, which is for richer people and very loopy and flourishy. You can see Round Hand in documents like the Declaration of Independence, which rich people in the 13 colonies wrote. Would you get arrested if you used the wrong cursive? Hand, yeah.

No, it was more of a thing of you didn't have the resources to learn it. And there were- You didn't have the resources to fatten up a loop? And there were people with the job title of pen men who went around being paid to teach rich people and also to write things for rich people in this loopy style. What did the rest of us get? Like, did we get trash hand? That was just, you know, chicken scratches? Yeah, chicken scratch scribbles or manuscript letters. Yeah. And yeah. And then from there, people said, hey, poor people deserve to learn cursive too. This is not okay. And in the mid 1800s, Britain and Canada and the United States started getting more and more public education going. And in the 1840s, an Ohio teacher named Platt Rogers Spencer created a systematized cursive teaching method that became called Spencerian cursive and a main way decades of people in the U.S. and other countries learned cursive.

way decades of people in the U.S. and other countries learn cursive. He would also do like writings for people under his business name, which was Spencer for hire. 80s TV reference, everybody. Oh, my God. I like that you didn't go Spencer's Gifts. I appreciate it. I dig it. It's good.

So this is the guy that ruined it for everyone, huh? Yeah. So this is the guy that ruined it for everyone, huh? Yeah. Him and one more guy in the 1890s, an American in Iowa named Austin Norman Palmer developed a new cursive for businessmen that then got taught in schools so kids could learn to be in business. Austin Norman Palmer is a kill the president ass name. Yeah. I guess there's a President Palmer in 24, right? It feels like that guy. Yeah. Sure is. Our first black president. name. Yeah. I guess there's a President Palmer in 24, right?

It feels like that guy. Yeah, yeah. Sure is. Our first black president. Yeah. Yeah. Now he sells insurance. Yeah. And that variation on Spencerian writing, the Palmer method became pretty much what

U.S. schools taught from the 1890s until Common Core. Until 2013. And now, again, after Common Core. So that's, that's where we got it. And no one's really checked if it's good or not. It's just what we've been doing for a long time. You know what? I'm not going to do it anymore. I'm out. Yeah. Taking a stand. Yeah. So many of us bail and it's because the foundations are so all over the place and not stable. It's also established as like a chore. Like it was created as a thing that we had to learn.

Like anybody who has even the smallest amount of oppositional defiance, as soon as they're told they don't have to do something, are going to be like, well, f*** this forever. Yeah. Yeah, it's a rebellion we can do. to do something are going to be like, well, this forever. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a rebellion we can do. Sorry about my cool language. Cursing's a sign of intelligence. You know, I read it in a blog post. Cursing cursive related names, right?

Not really actually, but yeah. It's actually pronounced cursiving on this show yeah that's the only time i use cursive when i'm writing a swear word i want them to look really fancy yeah and that's how i sign my checks like declaration of independence cursive string of profanities john hancock says says I was going to say leaving the John Han off the signature, if you know what I mean. What do you mean?

Because that's his Christian name. Folks, that's the main episode for this week. And yet another thank you to our wonderful guests, Adam Todd Brown and Jeff May. Unpop's podcast network, and especially the podcast You Don't Even Like This Show, that's where you can find Adam every week and Jeff many weeks, most weeks as his co-host. And then Jeff May has his own show called Jeff Has Cool Friends. They're just such great people and creators. And I'm so glad they could make time for this because what a great time me

and Katie had with them. And carrying on with the outro, we've got a bunch of fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, the single biggest change that pushed us away from cursive was the invention of modern ballpoint pens. Mega takeaway number two, many centuries of cursive styles developed as specific cultural and national statements. Mini takeaway number three, italics started out as an iconic cursive from Italy. And so many stats and numbers about the rise and fall of cursive in modern times,

how students feel about it, how well students do writing it, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists. So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is cursive singing.

The practice of cursive singing. It's all around you. You had no idea. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 16 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio.

It's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include a lot of coverage of modern education from Vox, Education Week, the LA Times, NPR, and more. Amazing science writing by Philip Ball for Nautilus Magazine. Digital resources about older cursives from the Smithsonian National Museum of

American History, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, also the Dartmouth College Ancient Books Lab, and also books by Harvard researcher Matthew Battles. His book is Palimpsest, A History of the Written Word, and a book by University of Sunderland professor and calligrapher Ewan Clayton. That book is The Golden Thread, The Story of Writing. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenape Hokang, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapentree people, as well as the

Mohican people, Skadigok people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy. Adam taped this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva and Keech peoples. Jeff taped this on the traditional land of the Gabrielino-Ortongva people, Keech people, Chumash people, and Fernandinho-Taraviam peoples. And I want to acknowledge that in my location and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a

tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 24. That is about the topic of potatoes. Fun fact, after the Columbian Exchange, one French activist made potatoes popular across Europe based on his experiences as a POW. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode.

Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network

of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.