Elegant W, do not leave us
There was time in my life when my sole aspiration was to make a cursive W as lovely as the one my third-grade teacher could make. That curly swirl at the top left, the sweeping, commanding strokes from top to bottom, the slender points that anchored it to the baseline, the wave of “wait-there-is-more” at the top right – I wanted so much to fill a page with W’s like that. But the 22nd letter of the alphabet in its dress-up clothes eluded me. I tried but I couldn’t duplicate my teacher’s brilliant artistic flair with W.
I had to settle for fence posts.
I was just chatting with a friend, the lovely Leeana Tankersley, over coffee last week and I told her I had once wanted to be an elementary school teacher just so I could learn how to make that W. Surely they wouldn’t let you teach any child anything until you could.
I became a writer instead, which should have launched me into an epic and intimate relationship with cursive W, but writers these days use electronic devices that have no use for cursive anything. I make Ws all the time but I tap them out with all the finesse of a woodpecker. There is no artistic call to W anymore.
No one wants to read a manuscript written in a scripted font. I am not even writing this blog post in a scripted font. It’s just not done. We print these days when we have to write anything by hand, unless it’s our signature, of course. But Susan Meissner has no W.
I have no need to make the formal W.
The sad thing is, nobody does. And I wonder what most third-grade teachers pass off as their best long hand, cursive W these days. I wonder if anyone, anymore, can make a W like Grandma used to make.
Today’s San Diego Union Tribune had a rather disturbing article about the imminent disappearance of cursive handwriting. It’s on its way out, experts say. Like the abacus, the slide rule and the quill and ink. Eight-year-olds are learning to write on keyboards with Times New Roman as the rule. They won’t spend classroom hours doggedly practicing the cursive alphabet.
I am already mourning what we will lose in that transaction. It’s not that I think the keyboard needs to go. I just wish they didn’t have to cancel each other out. What will happen to the personal signature? Will that go the way of electronics as well? Will we one day sign our marriage certificates and love letters and wills with a sequence of electronic dashes and dots? I think we will miss something when cursive writing disappears. Something that made us creative and individually unique. And we won’t know what we are missing until it’s way too late in the game.
Oh, lovely W. You were a challenge to me. You and Z and H and Q. I will miss your dress-up clothes. I will miss the way you looked when you meant business -but in the most beautiful way. You made the alphabet graceful. And you made us graceful.
I won’t forget you. . .