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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2691 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 2, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What do young people's signatures look like?

Everyone I know has a signature based on cursive script, but apparently schools aren't teaching it anymore, so what do young folks do on forms? Just print their name and draw some stars around it like Krusty the clown? I remember hearing there was a high level of ballot curing in Nevada because "young people don't have signatures anymore" but idk what that even means. Or even more broadly, is bad penmanship going to create legal problems because nobody writes things down anymore, they just type them?

Millennial here. I just write my name down in cursive. For a while when I was a teenager I tried to half-ass a real signature by adding come curves on top, but I gave up on that years ago.

Signatures, like wax seals, are an obsolete relic of an age before instant telecommunications and cryptographic security. The idea was to have unique glyph that was easy for the owner to recreate and easy for other people to read and compare with other examples of the same glyph but hard for other people to forge.

These days it basically works on the honor system; I have never seen anybody compare signatures against an example on file before authenticating a transaction.

I have. A colleague who persistently couldn't match his signature to the one a bank had on file was a constant pleasure. Then again, we mongrels used fax machines up to 2020 that I know for sure, and probably are still using to this day as well.

Kids just write their name as fast as possible until it starts to look like cursive. Only the initials have to be legible. There's not much thought into it.

In compulsary education, a student is probably going to be writing their name on paper 3-8 times a day from 1-12th grade. I don't think this will ever change for as long as we have paper tests and paper homework.

Schools in my country still have cursive last time I checked.

I simply write my name in my own brand of scrawl that's so bad even my own signatures don't look alike.

my own brand of scrawl that's so bad even my own signatures don't look alike

Yeah that seems like it would be a problem. Here in the US when you vote they compare your signature on your ID with the one you put down on record at the ballot place. If it's insufficiently similar I assume that means they can tell you to take a hike or something

I had a minor kerfuffle on a major bank transaction due to my signature not matching. Wasn't the end of the world, but did result in some hassle.

(That was also the day I found out my signature is notably different when writing with a felt-tipped pen.)

I just print my name. I can write cursive script, of course, but I usually don’t day to day: it’s either messy or time consuming.

Realistically signatures have always been forgeable.

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