Word: penmanship
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Paul Hoffman, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, knows zero well, having received one in penmanship in second grade
...increasing complexity of today's global community demands a more sensitive, nuanced line. One without an everyman tip. With a fountain pen, the angles and curves of one's unique penmanship are made clear, the ambiguities and hesitations of the writing struggle as plain as day. The technocracy shall not survive...
Names, one discovers, can be tricky--even without adoptions, divorces and illegitimate children. "Drunk census takers and bad penmanship can drive you insane!" says Rawlings, the Florida real estate broker. Lorraine St-Louis-Harrison, a Canadian genealogist, had a hard time tracing her French-speaking grandfather until she realized that an English census taker had transcribed St Louis as "Salway." Likewise, immigrants disembarking at Ellis Island found their names arbitrarily Anglicized. And some families, wanting to assimilate, did so later on their...
...when Europe was in ruins and civilization had been bested for a while by its discontents, that Brassai discovered the weird beauty of graffiti. Just as he had seen what was lovely in the louche spectacle of the Parisian cafes, he recognized what was indelible about graffiti, the bad penmanship of the group unconscious. In his photographs of the stick figures and screaming heads carved and scribbled on Paris walls, you find the most unruly human impulses--sex, anger, even exaltation--brought alive and made legible in odd corners...
...ended by fate's whim. In an exemplary cast the standouts are Luisa Conlon and Leelee Sobieski as the daughter at seven and 14, and Anthony Roth Costanza as her brilliantly effeminate best friend. The Merchant-Ivory attention to period detail often seems like the movie equivalent of good penmanship. But here it accrues a kind of ethical eloquence. These are people who try hard to love each other, with passionate clumsiness or a heroic, fading grace...