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[personal profile] steepholm
I enjoyed Anne Rooney's piece at the Awfully Big Blog Adventure yesterday, on living a 1960s day (a British child's one, anyway). It all sounds very familiar - except for the ink-dip pens.

Our desks still had ink wells, but I never got to use them, to my regret - they looked fun. We had fountain pens instead, rather primitive ones that lived up to their name by leaking from many an unexpected orifice. Being left-handed increased the complication, not only because I had to get special nibs but because of the danger of smudging the wet ink with my following hand. Blotting paper was my friend, but often alas a false one.

For decades I assumed that it was my early ink-smudging experiences that caused me, like many lefties (though far less than some), to assume the characteristic "hook" position for writing, which involves looping one's hand up in a wide evasive manoeuvre and surprising the paper from behind. However, I've noticed that almost all my left-handed students continue to write this way (and one or two righties, too), even though they're unlikely to have been traumatised by fountain pens at an impressionable age. So perhaps there's another explanation?

Now I need a Wellcome Trust grant so that I can travel the world watching left-handed children writing in Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese, and produce a learned report about it all. If only boustrophedon were still in common use I could study that too! (I wonder why it isn't?)

(no subject)

Date: 2014-12-10 08:22 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] karinmollberg.livejournal.com
Har, the Trust should be granted you! Boustrophedon is still used by certain people such as a gymnasium (lycée/high-school in Swedish) schoolpaper mate of mine who could easily write in any direction; up, down, back and forth plus mirror-wise (unfortunately she was also in the habit of doing this with sharp instruments on her arms til she started doing cartoons that she said, stopped the urge somewhat) but I've always wondered about that writing position (hers was straight up). Being a born leftie forced to change to rightfulness, I never wrote that way either way but then, in Sweden we only had pencils and ballpens to write with and my (rightful) parents failed to teach me how to write with a fountain pen so I regret not having the experience. Maybe it's some kind of protectiveness of the written words that makes people sit that way at catching up and hiding what they are doing?

(no subject)

Date: 2014-12-10 08:26 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] steepholm.livejournal.com
Maybe it's some kind of protectiveness of the written words that makes people sit that way at catching up and hiding what they are doing?

There's a scene in The Caucasian Chalk Circle in which one of the characters is teaching another one how to eat like a poor man, and he tells him he should put his arm round the bowl protectively, as if afraid of its being snatched from his grasp. This does have something of that look, as if lefties are constantly engaged in confiding secrets to a teenage diary.

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