> I've never understood the internet's hate for cursive. Are people who don't learn cursive not able to read the first line of a California license plate, or locate a Walgreen's pharmacy?
It's sort of an outdated mode of writing that survived due to inertia. Cursive is super, super useful when your writing tool can't withstand repeat impacts against the writing medium -- like a quill -- or if lifting will cause your writing tool to leak against the medium. Theoretically it's also faster to write than block characters, but the speed differences appear to be minimal for short-duration writing with the benefit of uniformity of block characters _outside_ of cultures that stress uniformity of cursive lettering. Worth pointing out that the examples you give here are not especially stylized letters and that Walgreens, outside of its red cursive letter logo, generally prefers a sans-serif block lettering. That said, I'm sure for someone not familiar with cursive lettering the 'r' and 's' look especially inscrutable, but most humans tolerate unreadable characters pretty well when scanning words we already know.
The slow death of cursive is indicative of the change in medium: most people write to one another by computer, or on mechanically printed paper. It's a similar process by which we started adding vowels, spaces and punctuation: the constraints of the medium or its tools improved with time.
It's sort of an outdated mode of writing that survived due to inertia. Cursive is super, super useful when your writing tool can't withstand repeat impacts against the writing medium -- like a quill -- or if lifting will cause your writing tool to leak against the medium. Theoretically it's also faster to write than block characters, but the speed differences appear to be minimal for short-duration writing with the benefit of uniformity of block characters _outside_ of cultures that stress uniformity of cursive lettering. Worth pointing out that the examples you give here are not especially stylized letters and that Walgreens, outside of its red cursive letter logo, generally prefers a sans-serif block lettering. That said, I'm sure for someone not familiar with cursive lettering the 'r' and 's' look especially inscrutable, but most humans tolerate unreadable characters pretty well when scanning words we already know.
The slow death of cursive is indicative of the change in medium: most people write to one another by computer, or on mechanically printed paper. It's a similar process by which we started adding vowels, spaces and punctuation: the constraints of the medium or its tools improved with time.