543
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
543 points (94.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
6088 readers
2156 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
The word "cursive" as it colloquially understood in America is the exact alphabet posted in the above image.
If you ask almost any American GenX or older "hey, what is the word for 'joined up writing' ", they will answer "cursive", and they will be specifically thinking of that precise style.
Meanwhile I have two kids who JUST learned to read and they are both able to read cursive. They have not been formally taught this style, and any attempt they'd take at writing it would likely be an illegible mess, but they absolutely can understand it.
Exactly my point, cursive refers to that exact style of joined-up writing. It is not a word which refers to any and all joined-up writing. If you ask almost any American what cursive is, they’ll point to the style as shown in the first image.
If you ask almost any American what “joined-up writing” is, they’ll point to the style in the second image. Because if you were referring to Cursive, you would have said cursive, not joined-up writing.
If you avoid using the very common specific term for something in favor of a less common, more general term, people will assume you’re not referring to the more specific thing, because you’ve gone out of your way to not use the specific term.