Once upon a time (before long distance telephone rates became affordable) people wrote letters to one another. In fact, the most cost effective method of communication was the United Postal service; it was a time in the distant past, when their primary function was not to stuff trash into people's mailboxes on behalf of direct mail companies, who seem to be too busy to throw it out themselves.

Of course, free of Ma Bell's iron grip most folks decided that if they really needed talk to somebody, they could just call the person and be done with it. If you're old enough, you might remember that the phrase, "shut the hell up, I'm on a long distance call!" was an almost irresistible command. People only made long distance calls to speak about birth and death.

Letter writing remained the favored communication method of cheapskates everywhere, even when the cost of a call to the coast became comparable to the cost of a pleasant evening out. It almost died completely though, and most young people out there have never written a letter at all. That is, until everyone started getting email addresses.

Inevitably, technology pundits began trumpeting email as the return of the lost art of letter writing in shiny new packaging. But it wasn't a perfect one-to-one correlation: Letter writing was long dead by the time email became popular. If email replaced anything, it was long distance phone calls to unpopular friends and relatives. I think the most pathetic casualty in this switch to the electronic post-it note was, like writing letters, almost completely obsolete by 1996. Now I find myself wondering, whatever happened to cursive? The only time I ever saw it was on paper based correspondence.

There are lots of things that we don't want kids to know about: Sex, drugs, the fact that American democracy is a sham... and we have lots of ways for parents to discuss such topics out of the earshot of the of their children (who oftentimes wouldn't even have been conceived if it hadn't been for sex, drugs, and unregulated campaign financing). For England's gentry, I'm sure parents would mull over the maid's indiscretions in heavily accented French, without worrying about the kids being around. For American parents, it was pig-latin. But the ultimate security could be had by cleverly combining cursive and poor penmanship. My parents would leave their letters on the coffee table, secure in the knowledge that I wouldn't be able to pierce the code and realize that my grandfather had decided to write us out of his will.

Over the past few years, people in who work in technology often get so used to using a keyboard, that they can even forget how to print (remember, "writing" is cursive, "printing" is... um, normal). As we become a more keyboard dependent society, we know what will happen to printing: Just remember what happened to cursive. At last report, the last bastion of the cursive style is the signature. There it will stay, at least for a little while; and our children will ask us why we put that funny squiggle at the bottom of our checks and bail certificates. And eventually, even we won't remember.

Especially when the signature is dropped entirely, in favor of our thumb prints.

-B. C. Silvia