It’s true, but indirectly.

Old people went to school and learned to write. I mean, they needed to use a pen and make letters and then - get this - were assessed and graded on it; and if they weren’t doing this well enough, it’s one of many reasons they as kids could have been - steel yourself - kept back from moving up to the next schooling year.

Really. The inability to ‘write’ could force someone to repeat actual learning again, and for a full year. Oh, the horror!

Similarly, we were taught how to make sentences and - it gets worse - write something creative, in this manual format, without errors, directly from something we called an imagination.

And the style guide of the time used two spaces. In addition to the requirements to make a sentence and a paragraph, properly, lest they be held back - not as a consequence of failure, if you’ve ever heard of the notion, but as part of a programme requiring success - also the style guide of the time was a little arbitrary. It’s like how the one-space fixation is equally arbitrary but without the ability to make a full sentence without kidgin or memes.

Yeah. Telling. It’s a tell. Watch me say ‘please’ or ‘pardon me’ and completely out myself as anachronistic. I often feel like this and other badges of honor like “being home alone and apparently not dying immediately” weigh me down a bit. I struggle. I’d demand a medal but all these medals are how I got this odd lean in my posture already.