Litmus Test of a Generation Gap

It seem that I’m not the only one who has noticed that knowing the Māori words to the national anthem is somewhat of a shibboleth in New Zealand. If one knows the words they are either below a certain age, or they are a school teacher. Or they sing in a choir. I’m reminded of this because of the story about one man doesn’t want New Zealanders barely mumbling half the anthem during the preludes to rugby world cup matches, when millions of people around the world are watching.

Personally I think singing in both languages is a bit silly and they should just choose one for these sorts of occasions. And I don’t care which language is chosen. However, if you chose the English version, you’re racist and if you choose the Māori you’d be PC. So we have to be even more PC.

Which leads me to another slight peeve of mine. Have you noticed that a lot of people say Aotearoa, New Zealand, when referring to this country? This would make sense if one was speaking to an international audience, but I think it is a fair expectation for all New Zealanders to know that Aotearoa is the Māori name for this country.

The Decline of Handwriting

The Press has a story about handwriting. Or rather, the lack of it these days with the advent of computers, especially amongst boys.

My theory on how computers impact handwriting is nowadays the only place where handwriting is done by school students is at school. Handwriting is not associated with communication and literacy in general, but purely with school. Ask any student at school where they want to be, and you’re likely to get “anywhere but here” as a reply. School could easily be the only place where they write anything beyond filling in forms.

In times gone by, people wrote letters to each other by hand. One didn’t have to wait days for a letter to get to a friend, then some time for a reply. Nowadays we have email (even that is regarded as old school by some), instant messaging. Or one can avoid the written word altogether and have video conferencing in real time with skype, for example.

I also have something to put to those “back in my day, we wrote things by hand” rose-tinted glasses people. I would say, even “back in the day”, any official or otherwise formal letter would not have been handwritten, but typed. Unless it were something like Letters Patent which would have been done by a skilled calligrapher. And there weren’t that many of those. So if typing was an important skill, then one might have said back then if you had an easy way to produce typed documents, why wouldn’t you?