Although this post might firmly place me in the league of what the Spanish would term as "old carriage" or "big underpants" (Sorry, I'm an enthusiastic fan of bad literal translations), or in other words an old git, I would like to point out that I'm younger than Bill Gates and the late Steve Jobs, or indeed both of them put together (!).
When I were a lad...
When I started to write with joined-up letters, we had to use quill pens with bakelite or wooden shafts and steel nibs that were dipped into our porcelain desk inkwells every two or three words, pressing lightly on the upstroke and hard on the down. The inkwells would be refilled every morning from impossibly huge bottles of Stephen's Ink and over the weeks the inkwell, almost impossible to clean out, would fill up with sludge and blotting paper.From the age of 8 to 11 we weren't allowed to use ballpens, although we could use our own fountain pens (usually steel Osmiroids). Ballpens and long trousers... the ultimate sign of maturity!
Indeed, previous generations had had to make do with slate boards and a stubby piece of chalk (or were they horses' teeth bought from Tesco?). Exercises were done and then wiped, done and wiped, done and wiped, leaving no trace of what had been written thereon before. Today's i-tablets are about the same size as the old slate tablets - not that coincidental considering that both serve the same basic function and that they are made in proportion to the human body.
The great thing about i-tablets is that although we wipe what is written on the surface, it sinks into the device's memory and can be recalled at will. The tablet may, superficially, have been wiped clean, but it will never be a tabula rasa like the slate. If we want completely to wipe the memory, we need to reformat the device, yet even so ghosts of the content remain and can be accessed by those who know how. Memory - and the more the better - is what makes us what we are, so perhaps i-tablets are more human than hard, cold, clean slate.
Though I never actually used a slate at school, I was familiar with the dip-in pen and the clogged inkwell. In our case, ink was supplied from a metal can with a long thin spout and only the most trusted pupil was appointed ink monitor.
ReplyDeleteWhen the ballpoint first went into general use, it was technically rather poor. It too easily produced blots and blobs and was liable to leak in your pocket or bag. There was noticeable friction between the paper and the cheap pen nibs that we used and this helped steady the hand. Ballpoints rolled too smoothly over the paper and it was easy to deform the letters. Teachers soon agreed that "ballpoints ruin your handwriting" and therefore banned the intruder from the classroom.
They might as well have banned the tide from coming in. The ballpoint soon carried all before it and careful handwriting styles such as Italic and Copperplate slid away into oblivion. There was some truth to the accusation and these days there no prizes awarded for neat handwriting. Schoolchildren print their "projects" from the Web and university students type their essays on their laptops.
In a way it is sad that we have lost the beauty of elegant but characterful handwriting though I should not complain as I my own handwriting is poor and I daily bless the electronic devices that allow me to produce legible if aesthetically boring texts.
One wrote on a slate, not with chalk, but with a special slate pencil, made of softer slate or of some other soft stone or, later, of composite material. The advantage of the slate over the exercise book was that you could make it emit a loud and irritating screech and thus annoy the teacher...
Now, as they say, the boot is firmly on the other foot. As I'm the only person in the classroom with a blackboard - it may not be slate, but it still emits a satisfying squeal when I scrape my nails down it - I use it to great effect when I need to get the attention of a classroom full of boisterous students.
DeleteCuriously, there is one day in spring when the sap rises among Sevillian students and for one day only it is impossible to do anything - even with the threat of blackboard scraping!