On Dec 7, 2004, at 6:44, Sandi Woods wrote:
Far be it for me to set myself up as an oracle of all things calligraphic*,
Perhaps not, but, to me, you *are* an oracle of all things "well balanced" - both as regards shape and colour proportions. So, when you chose a right-curling T, despite it being less commonly used, it seemed to me a possiblility that you might have run into similiar problems as I had had, with the left-curl.
Further perusal of any graphic/calligraphic book will offer any number of
ways of producing a recognisable letter 'T'
Mmm... Some of them are recognisable only because of their position in the whole sequence; take them out of context, and you may wonder what you're looking at. Your "T" is perfectly recognisable as a "T" to me - even out of sequence - *now*. But it wouldn't have been 32 yrs ago, when I first came to US; for the first 23 yrs of my life (in Poland), I'd never seen it... And the younger people there are even more likely to be unfamiliar with it, I'd think.
My advice? A large Gin and Tonic, with ice and lemon...........!
Prefer sour-mash bourbon, with ice and lemon-lime sparkling water :)
[...] cursive handwriting [...] the new school's headmistress became enamoured by the fashionable new style of writing......'Italic'.
Could someone, please, explain the difference to me (off-Arachne)? I've been using the two terms more or less interchangeably, except for reserving "cursive" for hand writing and "italic" for the 'puter writing...
...so we were issued with 'dip' pens and inkwells in desks were duly filled (this really does show my age here - if anyone isn't following this, either ask an ageing
relative or visit a museum!).
Tee hee :) We didn't start school till we were 7 - old enough not to be permitted pencils outside of the "drawing class". And we all had to use dip pens throughout the first two years... Not just in the calligraphy class (an hour a week, first grade only; it was abandoned later, as being too "bourgeois"), but in all subjects. In third grade, *if you were judged proficient*, you were permitted to move on to a fountain pen and a "single line" notebook (as opposed to a "three line" one, where two thick lines marked the limits of the "bellies", and the thin ones the limits of the "canes"). I was in *fifth* grade before I was allowed to ditch both. By which time, getting a pen nib to fit a dip-pen (the fountains had replaceable nibs still, and those were easily available) was becoming a major problem, so all of mine were always in a sorry state...
The moral of the story? Never underestimate the lunacy of people with power!
Or the power of "tradition", however lunatic. OTOH... :) When I visited the "Michie Tavern" here in Virginia in '01, we were offered the opportunity of signing the guest book with a goose quill, dipped in an ink-pot. Both my (Polish, same age) friend and I acquitted ourselves more creditably thn most <g>
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Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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