Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)

Amanda Babcock wrote:


> On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 01:15:13PM +0200, Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
 Second, typing is considered impersonal and thus
> > will end up at the bottom of the stack. It is considered that if you
find
> > something important, you'll write by hand for it.
>
> This is such an interesting difference between the countries.  I think
here
> in America, if someone wrote a cover letter by hand for a serious job
offer...

Absolutely.  Although I grew up in the days when typewriters were a luxury
(outside of the office), still there were definite forms for a "Business
Letter" as opposed to a "Personal Letter"... and by golly, that Business
Letter had better be PERFECT.   I did not own a typewriter IIRC until my
last year of high school (and we were not poor)..  In those days OTOH, it
was bad form to send out a typed Personal Letter, no matter how bad your
handwriting.  That was indeed impersonal.   Go figure. (Hence the lingering
prejudice against those typed-up/Xeroxed  things some people send out with
their Christmas Cards-- a genre ripe for parody!)

> well, first, it wouldn't look good coming through the fax machine, but I
> imagine that's yet another difference between our job markets :)
My job-hunting days are thankfully over, and preceded the invention of the
fax machine.

More to
> the point, writing by hand would be seen as childish and too informal for
> business contexts, I think.
"Childish" strikes me as too strong a word, but maybe in today's world...?
Informal, yes.  Or else the reaction might be:  what's with this person, who
can't afford a typewriter (or computer)??

> I think one of the reasons children don't care about cursive is because
they
> pick up on the societal attitude that cursive is a childish thing,
Ah, in the olden days, children printed, adults wrote, and learning to write
longhand (=cursive) was a sign you were approaching adulthood, or at least
something resembling it.:-))

One reason for the decline of writing for personal communication (at least
in the US) has to be the ubiquity of the telephone.  Calling long distance
used to be a very complicated procedure, and believe it or not, there were
people who did not have phones.

Well, enough of my Andy Rooney moment.