I readily confess to being someone who can all too easily say
how awful things are (or are becoming). Although some awful
things did happen a long way from here recently, that's still
very off-topic.

Nevertheless, one indulgence is what I take to be a progressive
decline, over perhaps the past century, in general ability to spell.

When a teen-ager insists that "ravalio" is the correct spelling
for "ravioli", that's not good, nor is "Thankvinks" (a holiday
in the USA, celebrated in November).

Some time back, I asked myself, "What's the next stage in this
decline?" My logical answer was, inability to write letters and
numerals with generally-accepted shapes. In my experience,
instances are still rare. One was a badly-malformed script "a"
in quite-elegant polychrome + metallic lettering on the cab door
of a construction company truck. It was about the same on both
sides. Some time back, a multi-day presentation that repeatedly
used the Greek letter alpha had an unrecognizable glyph.

Well, today, I looked down at the pavement on a local street
where a company known as "Dig Safe" had marked a region for planned
excavation, showing what was underground. The word "Dig" was
written in four places, two looking OK, but one "g" looked much
more like an "s", and had no descender ("Dis"). The fourth "Dig" was
plainly "Did", with the "d" "curled" like a small [eth] without
the stroke, or the "d" of partial differentiation.

I consider it sad when adults can't consistently shape their
letters right. I have read that some high school grads can't
read their diplomas; that's no longer news to me, nor is the
inability of a B.A. to read a document aloud without embarrassing
lapses.

Nevertheless, my contention about decline is probably bogus
to some degree; I no longer notice scrambled-case hand lettering
(MIIK, TrucKing), which is good.

For a longer-term perspective, surely letter (and numeral) forms
have not been static over time, and we might just be seeing the
beginnings of a Great Glyph Shift...

(Monocase, anyone?)

--
Nicholas Bodley |@| Waltham, Mass.
Opera browser fan/user