“The King is dead.” So is the cheque, checkmated (shah mat in Arabic, from which the killer move is named) by the digital forces of cards and electronic financial transactions.
What falls next? Signet rings are rarely seen now: they carry none of the weight the ring once held, ironically, on the pinkie when noble families used to stamp the debossed family crest into the hot wax to seal the deal. But as wealth and political power moved into more and lesser hands, the signature became mightier than the crest.
Nowhere are signatures more important or required than within the hallowed halls of banking. Once terms have been defined, conditions stipulated and figures checked, the signature stands as proof of acceptance of and commitment to the above. The spun sugar of most signatures, however, seems to aim at concealing identity rather than confirming it. Because such a signed document bears significant financial weight, the lack of resemblance between a signature and the signatory’s printed name may be to prevent forgery. Those whose signatures differ little from their name in print may be seen as naively simple: forging a plainly-written name presents fewer challenges than the roller-coaster signatures that pass as proof of identity. Apart from other reasons, the requirement that there be witnesses at the signing of important documents may serve to prevent the possibility of a signatory stating later, “That’s not my signature.” The scrawl of writing may not look at all like his name, but his protest will not go far against the word of bestman and bridesmaid.
On a recent visit to a bank, when my wife was asked for her signature, it was not a pen with which she did so, but an electronic stylus, property of the bank. Her signature is now also their property, kept in digital form as a record of how she signs her name. In real life it differs, even if slightly, every time, but its digital version will not. It is in perfect shape for a hacker to use if he breaches the system and accesses the files.
The cheque is dead, the signet ring moribund. Do signatures have a chance of survival? If not, why did I spend so much time at school developing what I thought to be a mature signature? Nor was I the only one. It was a common thing among us boys to practise signing our names in a distinctive way, the way grown-ups did, with flourishes and some dots in odd places. It made us feel big, important, because important people signed things.
The answer to the question of the signatures’ survival depends on another: will handwriting survive? The writer, Karin Schimke, made me aware of this ten years ago, when I attended a talk on the subject. Certain states in the USA had by then dropped the teaching of cursive script. Five years ago, Finland, renowned for its high educational standards, abandoned teaching writing skills, replacing them with those of typing. It seems to make sense: how many people carry a pen with them nowadays? Do people struggle to read type? Unless it can be proved that handwriting has a value beyond legibility, it will cease to be practised. Children will not protest: why teach us what’s not relevant to real life, they may ask. Plus it’s much more difficult to learn.
Functionality and convenience are criteria which suit a static state. Hidden from it are the creative processes which go into developing one’s own handwriting, the fine motor skills which bring into action a part of the brain which allows for creativity. Putting words on a screen does not get to grips with the form of the letters themselves: there is none of the spatial or aesthetic awareness which develops when practising handwriting. Every person’s handwriting is also different, similar to the uniqueness of fingerprints. It is a DNA in lettering. It is also proven that writing down things by hand is the best method of remembering them. Remove handwriting from the life experience of a human being and you deprive him or her of a skill, different from that learnt in touch-typing. Both skills are valuable, but the former connects the person to the letters as an author, not as a machine. As one writer on the subject put it, “To know a letter, you must ‘A’ it.”
As we today wonder at hieroglyphics and marvel over cuneiform, so will our handwritten script one day be artefacts of a bygone age. But that does not make it less valuable now. What the Egyptians put down reveals their genius which has caused it to stand the test of time. In their hands art and inventiveness flourished; in our hands works come to the page with a brilliance that makes them last. If the creative juice of handwriting dries up, we shall live in a typecast world.
