A is for @

Flowers for teachers, who'll be teaching everything from computer cursors to cursive writing...maybe. Children are growing up in that transitional time between handwriting and texting.  Many school boards have removed cursive writing from the curriculum.  There's much debate over what needs to be learned, and therefore what needs to be taught.

I was shocked to read recently, that many Canadian teens do not know how to sign their own name. They've never been taught handwriting.  After all, there's a font for that!  Hundreds to choose from. Until they have to sign their own name for a driver's license, or a passport, many teens have hand printed or texted their way through life.

My contemporaries joke that cursive writing will be our own secret code!

My and my late husband's family trees are deeply rooted in Quebec, where the Catholic church kept detailed birth, marriage and death records of everyone in the parish.  My heart leaps whenever I discover a document containing the signature, or signatures of our ancestors.  It represents education, literacy, and great opportunities.

Priests were educated.  They not only had to be able to read the Latin bible, they had to read and write in French, in order to document the lives of parishioners.  Often the names of the bride, groom, and witnesses are written in the priest's handwriting.  It is rare when the bride signs her own name.  I have one document of the burial of a family patriarch, inwhich all of his children have signed their names to the church record.  

For illiterate parishioners, the priest would sign for them, and the groom, or bride, or parents of a newborn child, would mark an "X" to indicate that they were present.  Sometimes their X is so close to the ending of their name, it looks like part of the name.  This is often the explanation given for names ending with the letter X.  It is also how one tiny branch of my family went from Devereau to Devereaux to Devericks (I have a theory, that the Irish who settled in Quebec and Ontario, thought the "X" was pronounced "icks").

Each person's handwriting is uniquely theirs.  A hand addressed envelope in the mail, announces the sender, even before you've opened it.  There's an energy in a person's handwriting that crosses the barriers of time, even death.  Reading old letters, or stained recipe cards handwritten by a loved one, brings back memories as powerful as a photograph.

What young romantic didn't write her name in her best script, over and over on the inside cover of a notebook?  Mrs. Paul McCartney, Mrs. Paul McCartney.  Handwriting made it look possible.

While I love handwriting, I spend hours a day on the computer, or, should I say @ the computer!  As modern as the symbol @ is, it is really ancient!

The Smithsonian's researchers trace the first documented use of the symbol back to 1536, when a merchant in Florence, Italy - Francesco Lapi - used the symbol to list units of wine, shipped in large clay jars, called amphorae.  (Amphorae is from the Greek, amphi-phoreus, meaning carried on both sides.  Each amphora -with a handle on either side - carried 20 to 25 litres of wine, or 20 to 25 of our modern bottles.  The larger amphorae held 36 litres of wine...I digress).

After Francesco Lapi (a name with so many flourishes, it would be a joy to write by hand), other merchants began using the symbol.  We even use it today to mean, "at the rate of", as in, three dozen eggs @ $4.69 per dozen (and they're not even the organic ones!).

Not all of us are merchants, however, everyone in the world with an email address or twitter account, uses @ in their address, and they have done so since 1971.  We have computer scientist, Ray Tomlinson to thank for that.  While working on an early form of the internet, he was looking for a way to send messages to specific destinations.  He came up with @, because the equal sign, "wouldn't have made much sense".  Tomlinson's first email left one teletype in his room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, went through the system, and arrived at another teletype in the same room.  That's been where it's @ ever since!

The Italians call the symbol for @, "chiocciola", which means snail, because the symbol looks like a little snail in its shell. Ironically, in Francesco Lapi's homeland, even email is snail mail.

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.