Bad Handwriting, a Sure Mark of Good Character.
It is the premise of these paragraphs that character improves with age, as is also said of fine wine, and as it does, handwriting decays.
By this measure the worse the handwriting the more trustworthy the man, and the more likely that he has, here and there, glommed onto a universal truth.
In the folly of youth the handwriting that emerged from the point of this pen was clean, straight, and narrow. You could read it for whole paragraphs at a time with no resulting fatigue of the eyes or decay of the cognitive faculties.
Tall letters stood as though at attention, small letters never got above themselves or gave themselves airs.
Each letter, in either printed or cursive style, did not encroach on the territory of the letters to the left or right, above or below, or as is sometimes the case now, with letters entirely somewhere else on the page.
In the latter case, the cursive style, the letters joined one to another in a smooth procession of horizontal linkages, similar to a freight train being pulled along the ruled lines on the otherwise blank page.
Vowels did not collapse in on themselves in the manner of curved metal piping that has given way to deforming stresses, and consonants, the workhorses of the alphabet, did not droop nor lean nor bend over as if top heavy.
T’s were crossed in a straight horizontal, and i’s were dotted with a spectacular exactness of placement that needed to be seen to be believed.
All in all, my script was a very model of clarity and precision, the type of thing that mechanical pencils, fine and triple fine point pens, and #2 test-taking pencils sharpened in a manner similar to those stakes adorned with poison at the tip and placed in an upward-facing manner at the bottom of Man Traps of the Dark Orient, were made for.
I freely admit this.
No one is a perfect person and my influences at the time drove me towards behaviors that I’d just as soon not dwell upon at this stage of the game. That was then, this is now.
I was an untutored youth.
Well, perhaps not that, or better put, exactly not that, I was an extremely tutored youth. It was more like I was in danger of being misshapen by an antiquated education system that couldn’t see what path these methods were sending their charges down.
Couldn’t they see what was right before their eyes?
It wasn’t until my education deepened and I extended my studies further in the instructive arts, such as at the movies, that it became obvious that clear and precise handwriting was a sure giveaway betraying the power-hungry monomaniac who lusted for world domination, no matter how much he tried to pass himself off as a regular guy.
I cannot say that I have ever seen a power-hungry monomaniac who lusted after world domination who didn’t have exactly the kind of precise, easily readable handwriting that I had mistakenly let myself fall into as a wayward child.
Think of examples from your own movie-going experience.
This fellow, monomaniacal and lusting after world power as we have said, when you see him pen the note that directs the recipient to kill our hero upon the earliest convenient time, all the careful viewer can say is, ‘man, get a load of that handwriting!’
Sister Joan in fourth grade would be proud to have him as a student and would no doubt have held his handwriting up as an example for the rest of us.
“This, this right here, this essay that young Felix McEvil has produced, this is what you should be shooting for. This is what I call penmanship.”
Well.
We see now that Sister Joan, while often on the right track on a number of topics, wasn’t right about everything, was she?
In like manner, when this evil fellow jots a quick note to a subordinate to melt New York City with the secret ray gun stored on the dark side of the moon sometime after lunch but before dinner, the penmanship is simply exquisite.
These underlings and thugs and sub-sub-supervillains have no trouble at all reading the guy’s handwriting and it is matter of mere moments before one of them is ringing up the dark side of the moon and asking the boys up there to make sure the Death Gizmo is adequately oiled and maintained. We might be using it soon.
It is little noted – in fact, this may be the first time in history that it has been noted – but if these same underlings and thugs and sub-sub-supervillains weren’t so clear about the villainy that they were expected to execute, if the handwriting wasn’t so evilly precise, the world would be a better place, a better place indeed.
A perfectly fine thug might look down at a sloppily written note and say, “um, Boss, this right here, are you saying the dank side of the man? The dark sale of the mange? The drink scale of the morn? Help me out here.”
What ensues is something that better finds a home in a back and forth routine on the vaudeville stage than in any respectable megalomaniacal conversation worth the name, as the exasperated villain points out that the intended message has to do with the dark side of the moon at the same time as another fellow serving also in the thug ranks asks, ‘and you want us to molt New York City? Like a bird molts? I don’t get it. I just don’t get it.” And he stands there with his hands palm up in the universal gesture of complete incomprehension.
Well, we here in The Rest of Mankind, are perfectly fine with complete incomprehension as regards these matters of written communication! We’re rooting for it in fact. The longer that incomprehension prevails, the longer we have to get out of the currently unmelted — or unmolted, if that is your preferred read — New York City.
No, it is far better, and not just in the jottings of madmen bent on destruction and the like, but extending to thank you notes, short stories, novels, essays, homework assignments, Christmas cards, and perhaps the notes from class lectures on our campuses and sermons in our churches that a certain, even pronounced, degree of uncertainty and incomprehension attend the handwritten words on the page.
It promotes improvisation on the part of the generous reader, filling the blanks and translating as best she can the scribblings, and she will likely assign meaning to the words that are much more apt, more profound, and more memorable than anything the originator could ever come up with.
And in any event, no one is likely to consider that you are asking them to destroy the world. You’d have written much more clearly if you were.
