The Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan [6]
The first use of cursive writing, or Italian “running hand,” was by Aldus Manutius, a fifteenth-century printer from Venice, whose name lives on today in the serif typeface “Aldus.” Cursive simply means “joined together” (the word has its roots in the Latin verb currere, to run), and one of the primary benefits of the “running hand” was that it enabled the writer to write quickly, and took up less space. But the uniform look of the script proved equally useful: in later centuries, before the typewriter was invented, all professional correspondence was written in cursive, and employees—men—were trained to write in “a fair hand,” so that all correspondence appeared in the exact same script. (Women were taught to write in a domestic, looping script.)
Cursive Italic
With the introduction of computers and standardized fonts, handwriting cursive documents is no longer seen as professional business etiquette—although for invitations, certificates, and greeting cards, handwritten is still the sophisticated way to go.
Nowadays, there are severalschools of thought about what nice cursive writing looks like, and writing in “a fair hand” is no longer entirely the province of men, as it originally was. Currently schoolchildren study a range of cursive, including D’Nealian, Getty-Dubay, Zaner-Bloser, Modern Cursive, Palmer, and Handwriting Without Tears. All of these styles are based on similar precepts about letter width and height, and all are designed to bring some uniformity and legibility to the handwritten word. (The Getty-Dubay team even has a series of seminars specially designed for the sloppiest of handwriters—doctors.)
Cursive Italic is a fancier way of writing cursive that can dress up even the most mundane correspondence. Like regular cursive, the letters are connected, but Cursive Italic has a more decided slant, and the rounded lowercase letters have more of a triangular shape to them. The form also lends itself to decorative flourishes, which is why you often see Cursive Italic used for wedding invitations, menus at fancy restaurants, and the like.
Italic lettering is written at a slant of about 10° from the vertical, with your pen held at about a 45° angle from the baseline.
Victoria Modern Cursive
In Victoria, Australia, a new style of handwriting was developed in the mid-1980s for primary schools. Now Victoria Modern Cursive is used across the country and is appreciated for its readability as well as its ease of elaboration—a few flourishes and the script is transformed from practical to fancy.
To practice, some writers like to write out their favorite poem as they work on perfecting their form. Here is a famous haiku from the eighteenth-century Japanese poet Issa that is a nice reminder of both the gradual evolution of human writing and the sometimes painstaking pace good penmanship requires.
Little snail
Inch by inch, climb
Mount Fuji!
Fourteen Games of Tag
AGAME OF TAG can be as basic or as complicated as you like: you can revel in the pure straightforwardness of one person chasing another, or liven things up by adding rules and strategy. Either way, tag requires no equipment, no court, no uniform—just someone willing to be It, and others willing to run as fast as it takes to avoid getting tagged and becoming It themselves. Here are fourteen ways of playing tag.
1. Blob Tag/Chinese Dragon Tag
In Blob Tag or Chinese Dragon Tag (also known as “chain tag,” “amoeba tag,” and “manhunt”), one person is It. But instead of being able