Old Or Older

Today we have a digression from craftiness. I was just wasting some time reading a discussion on one of the Yahoogroups that I belong to. The gist of it was an older fellow who objected to the acronyms that many people use in emails, such as LOL and NAYY. He wanted everything spelled out and he didn’t want to go look anything up or spend a few moments learning the more common ones. His excuse was that he was too old to be bothered. Ahem! One should never be too old to learn new things. If you are afraid of the new then you need to work on that because it will make you become old before you are really are. To stay young you need to stay flexible and in touch, expand your mind with new ideas, keep a sense of humour and fight inertia. You can’t help the passing of years but you don’t have to become a fossil.

On the other hand, skills like spelling and grammar truly are going downhill fast. In this era of texting each other on a cell phone with two fingers and a teeny set of buttons, you want to say as much as you can in as few letters as possible. I have to admit I don’t have a cell phone. But I do know how to touch-type properly thanks to my adopted mom’s passing on that one of her secretarial skills. (She however neglected to teach me the Pitman Shorthand that she always used to write her Christmas lists and anything else she didn’t want us to be able to read!) I never took typing in school because I was on the academic track and chose art or cooking classes when there was an elective available. I was always pretty good at spelling though spell-checking on the computer has made me lazy in that regard. As you might have guessed I really enjoy writing — but not with pencil and paper!

I consider keyboarding abilities really important these days. How many jobs are there now that don’t include some inputting into a computer? Not to mention leisure activities. My children both took typing in school and they are old enough for it to have been in the very early days of personal computers. My daughter can type so fast that I can’t imagine how she can even think that quickly. The keyboard is just an extension of her brain! Her skills began as a young teenager when she had typed conversations with 6 people at once on the old BBS systems (pre-Internet) and then were honed even more when she worked at a tele-answering service where she had to type messages in as fast as people spoke them. I’m a lot slower and not as accurate as I could be. But at least I can fix my errors on the fly. Not like the old days when I learned on a manual typewriter. Wite-Out was my friend.

I’m not the kind of person who fights innovation and invention. As a matter of fact, I’m counting on medicine to come up with a really good hip replacement for when mine gives out! And I love my hearing aids and my glasses with progressive lenses. I like that things are less formal now, people are more tolerant of differences and women have more options than when I was a child. What I don’t like though are the bad attitudes of a lot of people these days. Rudeness, inconsideration and self-entitlement do not make for a civil society. But I’m heading for a rant and I’ll stop there. My grandkids are coming over shortly and I get to babysit while their parents go see the new Spiderman movie. No fair! I haven’t seen it yet myself!