John Burroughs and his fellow naturlist and hiker Theodore Roosevelt replied to every letter they received. I am sure they had better things to do but i imagine they thought that was the proper behavior for educated gentlemen. I have to admit in the past 20 years or so i have not been writing many letters. I will write short notes to trading partners..but we each know what the other collects anyway.Its a shame if letter writing is lost..because its apparent that the writers i mentioned put MUCH THOUGHT into the words they used.
"its apparent that the writers i mentioned put MUCH THOUGHT into the words they used."
Nothing has changed! People are still very thoughtful. It's just that they've learned that any thought can be expressed in only 149 characters. For example, I read this in a recent on-line discussion:
"I don't know anything about that, so I won't comment."
See, only 44 characters, and not a single wasted character! If that isn't the product of deep thought, I don't know what is.
People now understand, as well, that any thought can be expressed in sentences containing only one-syllable words. Hey, it works for some national leaders! If any politician needs a vocabulary of more than a hundred or so words, they are clearly too intelligent for the job.
i can no longer put people on pedestals...they all have feet of clay. In his old age Burroughs was corrupted by his hiking buddies Henry Ford and Teddy Roosevelt.
I look for less and less letter writing as time goes by. My grandchildren will not be taught cursive in their schools. I guess the emphasis will be on typing on a keyboard. The world is changing with technology but is it for the better?
On September 10th i posted about the demise of letter writing.Yesterday an envelope came in the mail...did we purchase stamps ? Did someone send payment ? Even better it was a wonderful typewritten letter from one of our Stamporama members. It was everything a letter should be,chatty,informative and urging me to write a letter a week if possible.The written word does touch souls.
Harvey I think, therefore I am - I think! 26 Sep 2020 12:10:03pm
re: Letter writing
I'm a retired Math teacher, I retired 6 years ago. A couple years before I retied I had to change from writing to printing. I had a white board (not a smart board at that time) and would still write out the occasional word problem. This was high school, grades 10 to 12. I had a kid tell me one day in class something similar to this: "Sir, sorry but I can't read all that curly stuff". I asked the rest of this class and several more were having problems. By now cursive is a thing of the past, as is grammar and spelling! I don't like it much, but I guess I can see the point - after all, we don't really need logarithms or long division any more. If you want to see how bad things have become find some of Jay Leno's walkabouts on YouTube, he asks people on the street very simple questions and the results are amazing. I remember one young lady from Texas who had no idea where Mexico was. I'm not making fun of Americans, Canadians really are no better now!
cursive is still taught, especially in more holistic schools that understand the LINKING of letters helps some students more easily produce a word, rather than individual sounds.
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