Sometimes people fear that so many aspects of our society are crumbling. Either hockey players don't respect one another anymore, or the kids talk smart a lot more than they used to, or the values of yesteryear are being forgotten as we turn into a group of people obsessed with celebrity.If none of that frightens you, there is still one avenue we must fear becoming obsolete: Handwriting. It's just something I overheard in the office the other day, as someone complimented another on their impeccable cursive. That's cursive, not cursing. I've read before about a journalist who was embarrassed by her chicken scratch. Fancy and legible handwriting may once have been regarded as mandatory and essential for all, but we have completely given up on it. My handwriting is ugly. It's a mash up of printed and partially-cursive letters, strung together in jagged loops. There isn't really any cursive in there, but all the letters are connected because even though I am printing, my pen rarely leaves the page. It most closely resembles what happens when a four-year-old gets hold of a pen and draws on the walls. It got me thinking about what else has just fallen by the wayside, turned into a ghost of the '90s, '80s, and the many decades that came before. The next best thing to handwriting it typing, but I think that's another art that is lost on many nowadays. My typing is as bad as my handwriting, but they still both get the job done. I regularly type "with the" as "withe," and my hand position would best be described as "drifting" as my fingers bolt out in all directions to punch poorly placed keys. Now that people send e-mails, text messages and tweets with their thumbs, typing is taking a backseat. One art that isn't lost yet but is definitely on the way out is language. That is to say languages that aren't English and Mandarin. I remember meeting an American while travelling a few years back. He spoke excellent French, and we were in Paris so I just had him do my talking. As a Canadian, I told him we had mandatory French classes until Grade 9, and that's when I stopped learning it and began forgetting everything I had ever learned about speaking en Francais. I said in hindsight it would have been nice to know some French, and he asked why as though I was crazy, explaining that French is only spoken by French people. It was useless for him except while bartering with a street artist over a canvas painting my sister had an eye on. He didn't get the price down so maybe his French wasn't as good as I thought it was, but it sounded good. He was also studying Mandarin, a much more economical language to know. Everybody speaks English. It's spoken by French people, German people, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Scandinavian people, everybody. German people don't also learn French. They learn German and English. That's probably why the French can be so sensitive about losing their language. They are, in fact, losing their language and that's an important part of anyone's cultural identity. Losing these skills and crafts is in some respects like losing an endangered species. We fight hard to make sure pandas are waddling around hundreds of years from now, but we don't care much about handwriting or French.
