Sunday, January 13, 2008

Loopy

Handwriting is a strange beast. Methinks that, in this keyboarding world of ours, handwriting will one day be a thing of the past. And it's a good thing.

Handwriting supposedly says a lot about a person. I once did a handwriting analysis of my own chicken scratch, and found that I had a lot of interest in all things medical. Well, duh! The dh loves to boast of his third grade award for penmanship. He also loves to tear up our sons' writing, which is nothing short of illegible. There have been times that I have asked my oldest what the heck he wrote in a note to me, and HE can't tell me.

Now that is pretty bad.

But I've never beaten them over the head about handwriting, because after all, I'm a nurse, and I've certainly seen worse from the docs I work with. And ds18 can keyboard almost 120 words a minute, with no errors, so I keep it all in perspective and let it go.

I once worked with a doctor in Florida who, God love him, had, shall we say, less than a total command of the English language. He wrote pages and pages of orders, all of which were transcribed by a secretary, then double checked by a nurse. Occasionally, we'd come across something that was nothing more than a bunch of loops, in a long row. What the heck? We would look at each other, and then one of us would head over and ask him what in the world language he was writing in, because I knew Spanish, and this gibberish was closer to sanscrit than any romance language I had ever seen.

He would roll his eyes, sigh loudly, and then say, in an exasperated tone, "it clearly says bathroom priveges," or some such rot. What we realized very quickly was that, if he had no idea how to spell something, it just became a row of cursive lower case L's, and would only be translated by the author. I still think of him and smile.

So, to celebrate my favorite Spanish doctor -- who was quick to say that he was from SPAIN, not Central America -- here's a wonderful vintage 60s squiggles dress, from one of my favorite sellers, The Vintage Fashionist, on ebay. Loosely translated, it says, "buy me."

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