Opinion

Two types of trusting that rarely mix

Thursday, October 31, 2019

By James Giago Davies

Native Sun News Today Contributing Editor

Many of the people of my mother’s generation, born before WWII, had beautiful handwriting. Sometimes I will read back over old letters written by my mother, and I want to say the written notes my sons leave me by comparison, are chicken scratch, but that is an unfair indictment of chickens and their scratching.

Beyond the signature often eye-pleasing expression of cursive loops and dots, the way people wrote gave the reader revealing insight into their personality and nature.

Handwriting experts, graphologists as they are called, once had a much greater importance in society, but now are basically reduced to analyzing people’s signatures on checks and official documents. Determining just who people are internally by their handwriting alone was always highly suspect science, but the value of identifying who people are, is not.

While not as accurate as finger prints, if the person did not leave any finger prints on a document, his fake signature reveals his criminal intent.

Given how primitive the scrawl of young people has become, it is doubtful that cursive will be used as a form of communication, or taught at all at school, in the near future, and this can’t help but influence the way people sign documents.

While it will probably never devolve back to the level of the 19th Century, when illiterate cowpokes were instructed to, “Make your mark,” there is no doubt we are entering an age of sophisticated technology our parents would not have understood, even as people stop reading books, stop writing in cursive, and began to forget, or alternatively reinterpret, much of the reality we all took for granted.