The post offices are in trouble because people aren’t writing letters as much as they used to. I’m guilty of that crime just by posting this online. The senior management as the postal service is talking about discontinuing Saturday mail delivery and cutting jobs to stave off default on their financial obligations.
Sure, the computer age is partially to blame, because email is easy to type, quick to deliver and doesn’t require paper, a writing implement or a 44 cent stamp. On the other hand, these virtues are in themselves sins that are negatively affecting our proper use of the English language.
I do have issues with the electronic age that I don’t have with so-called “snail mail.” For example, typing gives you many more opportunities to make mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar. I pity those who rely heavily on “spell check” or other online grammar devices. I groan and right-click my way through many a warning that my computer offers, accusing me of writing “run-on” sentences. I plow through those squiggly lines at about 65 words per minute (without my first cup of tea).
With handwriting, one must sit and take time to craft characters and periods and commas, so one must also stop to think about sentence structure. I don’t think many people hand scribe “LOL” on a piece of stationery.
I can’t say that any script font in all Microsoft Land can beat good penmanship, with a real pen and blue or black ink. In fact, after suffering the ignorance of elementary school teachers who bowed out of the responsibility of teaching good penmanship, I took the time to hone my script myself and I’ll be darned if I’ll let that skill go just because I use a keyboard every work day. I still write in journals, hand write greeting cards and envelopes and enjoy using those little sticky notes to jot down notes to myself. Even the little one-inch variety can be fun to use.
We could ask some of our elders about the good old days when mail delivery was twice daily during the holidays, or when one could take a discount on stamps if they inserted the flap on the envelope without sealing it (don’t ask me why that made a difference, but it did).
Letters have always been the tangible evidence of life lived. Years ago I had the privilege of seeing Leonardo da Vinci’s notes in New York, up close. He wrote copiously, sometimes in backwards mirror code, sometimes in circular print and always in Italian. I took the time to look at the ancient writing set to parchment so long ago, and marvelled at how fresh it looked under glass, just inches from my eyes. The ages between us didn’t seem to matter. When will that be said of an email? In fact, which of these electronic blips in a machine’s memory will outlive us?
There is something about sitting down and writing a letter that slows down time, relieves stress and grounds us in the world that is really simple but for our own machinations that surge us forward with time-saving on the mind. The pen is really mightier than Microsoft Word when it comes to reminding ourselves that some old things like the post office are still relevant and need to be preserved.
(P.S. Back on 9/11 I was the first person on a message board to post about the events in New York and Washington. The post disappeared with the message board. If it had been a piece of mail, it would still be around today.)
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