Fic/Meta rec: Penmanship, by ashen key

[beatrice_otter]

ashen_key noticed something weird: Steve's handwriting, as seen in Cap 2, looks modern and not like someone who grew up in the 1930s.  So zie wrote a fic about it, which is short and excellent: Penmanship.

Comments

[synecdochic]

Before I read the fic:

The handwriting as presented is not only modern, it's got a lot of strong 'feminine' signifiers. It's clearly the printed handwriting of someone who learned D'Nealean. Steve would have been taught Palmer (or possibly Zaner-Bloser, I'm not 100% on the switchover dates) and his writing would look way more like this. (And it would be cursive, not print.)

That was one of the things that threw me out of the movie really fucking hard, in fact, and I have been meaning to write the essay on the development of English writing scripts in the 19th and 20th centuries for a while!

[beatrice_otter]

Please write it and link it here! (I love this stuff.) There's a tumblr called something like "historicallyaccuratesteve" that is cool, too.

[synecdochic]

Natasha's handwriting, when she isn't paying careful attention to playing a role, would be very distinctive as well: the English script of someone whose first writing script was Cyrillic is hella different from someone whose first writing script was any of the writing styles taught in the US these days, and very hard for the person doing the writing to override. (I have yet to find a good scan-and-upload of the English language handwriting of someone whose first script was Cyrillic, but you can get a sense of some of what it would look like by image-searching the phrase "russian cursive makes me cry sometimes", heh. Take that and map it onto Latin-alphabet writing and it's very, very distinctive.) I have tried to reproduce what it looks like to show someone, but my Russian handwriting was never really very good -- I was much better at speaking the language than reading/writing it -- and the "really hard to override" goes both ways.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

I learned what has been thought to be Palmer, and at garage sales with old books, it's always 'my' handwriting on the flyleaves.

I guess I wasn't thrown by his list because I consider that printing. (Stick and ball means I really only print when 'baby agents' (or actual kids) need to translate.)

[melannen]

You should still write that essay someday, I really really want to read it. paleography ftw.

[synecdochic]

I will someday! Especially now that I can type more :D

[marmota_b]

Very, very late reply: I think this article is relevant to this discussion, too.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballpoint-pens-object-lesson-history-handwriting/402205/
Because it happened to myself. Starting out with ink and a kind of cursive, and ending up with a weird print mixture after I started using ballpoint pens more often. Over a fairly short period of time that's probably more or less comparable to the period of time elapsed between Steve's defrosting and Winter Soldier.

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you!