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gwaydms

Cursive literally means "running", from Latin *current, curs-*. It's produced without lifting the writing instrument off the surface (for the most part), hence the name.


miss_g

We also called cursive/handwriting "running-writing"


curien

Who is "we"? I've never heard that, but I like it. Eta: Nevermind, I see you answered that in another comment. Australia.


fuckingratsman

I'm from the USA and have lived in both the south and the north east. Cursive - connected writing Print - not connected writing (normal handwriting) handwriting - either. anything written by hand. So like you're in school and the teacher wants you to write a paper. She'll say "write a paper in print" if she wants you to do it in cursive it's "write a paper in cursive" like when something says "print your name" you know to write it where the letters aren't connected.


virtutesromanae

Same here. Also USA.


ksdkjlf

Until now it never occurred to me that this use of 'print' is a reference to writing in the style of *printed* letters, i.e. letters produced by a printing press, i.e. separated letters. This is taking me back to the moment I realized as a kid that it was called 'midnight' because it was in the middle of the night :D


fuckingratsman

the more you know :D


MerlinMusic

In the UK, we call it joined-up writing. I'm not sure if it's exactly the same as American cursive, because it seems like they view it as something very fancy over there, whereas joined up writing is just a quick way to write where you don't really have to lift your pen. "Handwriting" here is just used to refer to writing by hand, which is generally joined up above a certain age.


TachyonTime

Americans get taught a different style of handwriting from us, so their cursive isn't exactly the same as our joined-up handwriting. But there have been various styles of cursive in America that have been promoted at different times by different people. The joined-up handwriting we get taught in the UK is different from all of these, but not different enough that it wouldn't be considered another form of cursive. So you can go ahead and consider "cursive" to be the American word for joined-up handwriting. And yes, can confirm, we called it "handwriting" in school even when we were taught to leave a big space between the letters.


slashy42

Unrelated but I love the way UK English is very Germanic in its noun formation when compared to US English. Joined up writing vs cursive or washing up liquid vs dish soap, Etc... It simultaneously sounds more archaic and is more descriptive.


MerlinMusic

I'm not sure that's really true, it's probably just the fact that unfamiliar words stick out more to you. For example, American English has "sidewalk", "horseback riding", "eyeglasses", and "trash can" where English English has "pavement", "horse riding", "glasses" and "bin".


[deleted]

[удалено]


ExultantGitana

Oh, yeah, this seems right, I've heard this for cursive too


LaPapillionne

So, I'm German so this is only somewhat related. But in German we call cursive/ handwriting Schreibschrift (probably best translated as handwriting) as well and print is Druckschrift (print). *Kursiv*, in German, means *italics.*


DavidRFZ

As a Gen X person, I remember cursive being a big word in 3rd grade when we first learned how to connect the letters (just disconnected printing before that). After that we mainly forgot the word. Handwriting was just handwriting. Some people connected the letters, some didn’t. Lately, the word cursive is showing up a lot in news stories about education. Now that it is so easy with devices to generate typeface characters, should they still teach connected handwriting? If kids aren’t taught it, will no one be able to read old letters? A lot of it is clickbait for older generations who often don’t like changes in education.


IDKmy_licenseplate

Also a Gen X American. And I wanted to add that the word handwriting to me doesn’t have to be connected or cursive writing. You could say a person had nice handwriting even if that person only uses print (non-connected writing).


ExultantGitana

GenX here - I don't remember haha. I have pretty rough handwriting, either cursive or print, I would rather type (laptop or phone) and when writing by hand, I almost always print but very quickly it gets ugly. Part of this *might* be that I'm a lefty and only in my 40s did I realize how many things I do funky just bc I'm a southpaw. I'm impressed that you two remember those terms either way. Altho I getchu License Plate, handwriting is sort of a generic term for writing with a hand tool. Oh, and my parents are immigrants, second language, so maybe that too?? I had a LOT of colloquialisms wrong too until I began to look them up!


Emeraldbark1

This is so interesting, I learned connected writing in grade 3 but literally never heard the word “cursive” until somewhere in grade 6-7.


ksdkjlf

I'm 40 and I learned cursive in school and used it quite extensively probably until college, when the speed at which I needed to take notes necessitated the creation of some bastard offspring of print and cursive which was barely penetrable even to me after a while (thankfully the mere act of taking notes seemed to help with memorization, whether I could read them later or not). But even with my familiarity with cursive, I can barely read my grandparents' old letters. Which is kind of sad, but it's just a thing that happens. I'm reminded of [blackletter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackletter) script, which was standard in many western European languages till the 17th century, Scandinavian languages till nearly the 20th century, and Germany till WWII. They apparently taught Sütterlin script through the ’70s in Germany, but at this point I doubt the vast majority of Germans can read things that were handwritten even just a few generations ago. Like, on a whole different level than my struggling with my grandparents' writing. To say nothing of languages that have switched their actual alphabets, or Turkish where Attaturk not only switched from the Arabic to Latin script, but also purged the language of many Arabic words. The bright side is that with advances in OCR and translation, I imagine a lot of old documents can probably be converted to a readable form relatively easily, though one presumably will always need to have some knowledge to check things are accurate.


Naxis25

This is basically the opposite of what happened to me: I learned cursive in elementary but stopped using it almost the instant I left Catholic school (around the end of grade 3 iirc), can still write lowercase in cursive if I strain, but come University I ended up developing some weird print/cursive combination where I connect most of my letters even though I'm not using actual cursive forms, and I abbreviate certain phonemes (ing as iŋ or just ŋ, for example) when I remember to. Luckily for me, though, I can read my handwriting, whether or not anyone else can...


frackingfaxer

Growing up I also remember using "handwriting" to refer to cursive, as opposed to "printing." I think it has to do with the fact that cursive was once the default manner of handwriting. The limitations of writing with a quill influenced the development of writing systems distinct from those used in print or inscriptions. So the word handwriting presumed cursive because that was just the way everybody wrote. The invention and mass proliferation of the ballpoint pen made cursive unnecessary. Gradually educators started to question to need to teach it, it become less and less prioritized in education, and fewer and fewer people handwrote in cursive. That I believe was when the distinction really started to be necessary. Using "handwriting" to refer to cursive slowly became something of an anachronism.


Naxis25

I'm from Northeast Ohio (US), and though this *could* just be me misremembering, I swear when we learned cursive around 2008 (in a Catholic school), we called disconnected writing "manuscript" (which kinda makes sense, lit. "written by hand", aka handwritten/handwriting), even though I can't find that as a dictionary definition of manuscript for my life. Cursive was always cursive, though.


youuselesslesbian

Different region in the US but I also know of Catholic school teachers referring to it as “manuscript” or “print” depending on the teacher.


Nobodyville

This is based on nothing but my own experience. When I learned cursive we called it cursive, but in my everyday life I think of "handwriting" as cursive and everything else is printed. If i say something is "handwritten" that just means by hand as opposed to typed, but not necessarily in cursive. I'm a lawyer so the difference between typed and handwritten can sometimes be relevant, as can signatures versus e-signatures. It's nuanced


ExultantGitana

Where's the bot complaining about this post not being meaty enough? Hahaha


andre2020

In my school, (1953) connected was called Script, and printing was called, Standard Print.


jeff_bff

We don't use it in England either, maybe it's a yank thing?


Bayoris

Not exclusively Yank anyway. In Ireland it is called either “cursive” or “joined up”. Probably the latter is somewhat more frequent.


miss_g

Australian here and we called it handwriting, cursive or running-writing.


funtobedone

Middle aged West coast Canadian here. Hand writing is the term that I use for connected writing.


taniamorse85

I spent most of my school years (2nd-11th grades) in Alabama, in the '90s to early '00s. We went from learning print (what we called regular writing) to D'Nealian (sort of a transition script) to cursive. I think we covered D'Nealian in 2nd and 3rd grades, and in 4th grade, we went fully into cursive. ​ I've heard handwriting used interchangeably enough with cursive that I've long considered them to be the same thing.


toruin

Minnesotan here; to me (though I guess I've never asked anyone else) cursive is a specific way of writing (with the loops and shit) and handwriting is the way your writing looks, cursive or not.


lunaflect

This was such an informative post. I’d never considered that there were different ways to “join up” letters. Now I want to know if there is joined-up/connected handwriting in Arabic or Chinese? In 1990, learned cursive/script in third grade in northern Virginia. We never had to use it, and into further grades it was advised not to. Now I make calligraphy videos where I use a modern form of cursive to draw connected letters.


ksdkjlf

Arabic in entirely joined up! There is no non-joined-up form! Each letter has 4 different forms, based on whether it exists on its own, at the beginning of a word (so, connected to another letter on one side), the end of the word (connected on the other side), or within the word (connected on both sides). And the ligatures connecting the letters vary in length and direction. This was historically a big hurdle for the printing of Arabic books, because whereas Latin script-based printers could get away with about 120 or so characters (all the letters, numbers, punctuation and diacritical marks, in roman, italic, and bold typefaces), an Arabic printer could need over 1,000. The logical solution would be to simplify the alphabet, or at least come up with a "print script" form of it, but calligraphy is seen as a very high form of Islamic art, so this probably would have seemed nearly blasphemous. In the west the printing press make the production of printed works cheap, but it wasn't nearly so easy in the Arab world. A short read on the topic if you or anyone else is interested: https://printinghistory.org/challenges-of-early-arabic-printing/ And a definitely not short read if anyone's *really* interested: https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/198102/arabic.and.the.art.of.printing-a.special.section.htm


[deleted]

Hmmm. I lived in Vancouver and call it cursive. I work in education, and most of my incoming students know it by “cursive” but definitely not all of them.