Writing 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - older generation please

[Derek Black]

As a younger member of the forum, 37 is young right?....

when being schooled in the 1980's here in bonnie Scotland it was a round topped 3, a single stroke 1, and the uncrossed 7.

I think the first time i was aware of the crossed 7 was in a war film, perhaps "The Eagl has Landed", or "Went the Day Well"? Where the villagers discover the German by his writing of a crossed 7

[Aurel Sercu]

Derek,

Believe me, 37 is so very young !

I (we ?) envy you. :-)

***

I enjoyed the more recent postings (and I learned a lot).

But if I may return to my initial posting.

This set was written for me in 2003, by a British acquaintance.

(Yes, I know, Derek, you were 25 then ... So very very very young ... :-) )

Of course when you see 1 2 3 ...

and then below that 1 2 3 ... 5 6 7 8 9

then you know that where I write the dots ... this is a 4.

But my question : suppose that you did not see what comes before and (in the second row) what comes after, that you could only see that digit 4, then wouldn't it be possible to see it as a 9 ?

Yes, I know, it does look different from the 9 in that bottom row, but I mean : isolated, no context, just that one digit ...

I think this 4 is different from the 4's that were described in the other postings, as, though it is closed, it does not have a pointed but a round top.

Aurel

[BillyH]

It's definitely a ""4" for me Aurel.

BillyH.

[Aurel Sercu]

Billy,

OK, you're English. (To be honest, I first had to find where "Wirral" is : north west of England, near the River Dee :-) )

So you are right.

Who am I to cast doubt on your opinion. :-)

Yet, I myself, if that same 4 as in my attachment in # 52 had been for instance in a number like 3542 , I really would not have known if I had to see it as a 4 or a 9.

Of course if there had been a 9 nearby, in the same context, that would remove my doubts.

By the way, do you (or someone else) think that that sort of closed and round 4 is used often now ?

Aurel

[BillyH]

At school in the early 1950's (so I definitely qualify as "older generation"!) I was taught to write my numbers as shown in the top line (below).

After working in a drawing office for 49 years they had changed as per the bottom line.

I must admit that I haven't seen a closed 4 with a round top before, but I would put it down to the sloppy way it has been written?

This is just me, but I construct a closed 4 using 2 movements - as shown in line 3. I think the closed 4 in your example is executed in one quick continuous movement, starting at the bottom of the vertical line, which leads to the round top effect?

BillyH.

[Ron Clifton]

I agree that the rounded 4 is a quick version which can be written in a single continuous move, though for me, starting at the right of the horizontal is equally likely (as one would write a Greek alpha).

I am of BillyH's generation and was taught the numbers as in his top line. I have never crossed my 7s either.

Ron

[Andy Wade]

I'm 1958 vintage, a bit old school and correct. But my handwriting sometimes 'looks like a spider fell in the inkwell and crawled across the page', which I seem to recall is what my teacher once told me in front of the whole class. I am more careful now.

We were allowed to do the other 'closed' version of the number 4 as well but I seem to have settled for the open one:

[Dragon]

Of course when you see 1 2 3 ...

and then below that 1 2 3 ... 5 6 7 8 9

then you know that where I write the dots ... this is a 4.

But my question : suppose that you did not see what comes before and (in the second row) what comes after, that you could only see that digit 4, then wouldn't it be possible to see it as a 9 ?

Aurel, if I were just shown that figure, with no other 9 or 4 to compare it with, I think I would be unsure. It resembles a rounded 9 to me, because it has been written in one stroke. In the second row, it is even more ambiguous.

A closed 4 would be written (by me) as firstly one open, angled line and then, separately, one down stroke (ie two strokes). I write my rounded 9s with one continuous stroke, but if I were to write a more usual British 9 I would write the upper circle and then pause (pen on paper) before making the down stroke.

The sign that your ambiguous figure is likely to be a 4 is the way it extends off to the right.

I agree with you, though, that it could be read as a 9, especially if it is being read quickly and not especially carefully. If it were important to me, such as having a legal impact, I would want to contact the writer and ask her or him to clarify exactly what was intended.

I write this as someone whose working life involved reading an awful lot of careless or poor handwriting!!

Gwyn

[Aurel Sercu]

Thanks, Andy and Ron and Billy,

Billy and Ron, you anticipated my next question.

Which would have been : "A rounded 4 a sloppy and quick way ? But it is a totally different way of moving, continuous. And : where do you start ? The bottom of the vertical line, or the right end of the hoirizontal line ?"

So you both (?) think it is (was tat the bottom of the vertical line ?

Gwyn,

I agree, the extending horizontal line proves that it is (meant as) a 4. But if that horizontal line had been (a little) shorter, I would have very serious doubts (if not a 9 nearby).

Aurel

[Dragon]

I agree with you. As I said, if accuracy was important I would wish to ask the writer what s/he meant. I wouldn't if it were informal and I could work it out from the context. But most of the time, it's vital that numbers are clear. This isn't completely clear.

Gwyn

[AlanCurragh]

Apologies for asking, but does this have anything to do with the Great War?

[bigbill]

I did wonder - about 60 posts ago.

[Andy Wade]

I thought it was to understand how numbers were formed in florid script, making it easier to interpret army records, etc.

Certainly useful to see how different people form the same number in different ways.
I'd like to see something similar in the forming of letters as well, because we get a lot of posts where people are asking what a particular word in a record might be. I had a similar question in a thread just a couple of days ago.

[Aurel Sercu]

Alan,

Lancejack,

You asked : "Apologies for asking, but does this have anything to do with the Great War?"

Apologies, for maybe I should have said at the beginning why I wanted to know.

I'm sure you mean the question I asked at the beginning, over 60 postings ago : The answer is : Yes, absolutely.

And I have had that problem for years. (If it had nothing to do with the Great War I would not have put it in Chit chat, but in Skindles).

I admit that it may be related to me (Flemish) not being familiar with the way digits were written in the UK at the time.

But my experience also was that even native writers and readers once in a while had different opinions. So I thought that maybe it could be useful to others.)

I sometimes wondered about whether a digit had been interpreted correctly or wrongly when a handwritten repot, e.g. after an exhumation in the 1920s, was typewritten by a clerk later. Several times I thought : Something is wrong here, Digit X probably was mistaken for digit Y. Especially in service numbers. Recently I had two cases where in a newspaper article (1915) the service number of two soldiers was given wrongly. And it made me think : this is not just a typo, there must be more, i.e. misreading of a handwritten number.

Or how numbers in Final Verification Forms were interpreted when returned by next of kin.( I was told by a military historian that misreadings of an age were not exceptional.)

Or obvious wrong readings in Army documents.

Or digits in Census forms.

And when I asked British contacts, contact A said that the digit was an 1, and contact B said it was a 7. Or confusion between a 4 and a 7, etc.

Aurel

[AlanCurragh]

All good, thanks Aurel

[bigbill]

Agreed.

[Aurel Sercu]

This has nothing to do with the way the digits are (were) written at the time (or early 1920s), but with something else that I came upon twice recently ... And it is a mistake that I myself might made too : that in a 4 digit number the second and third digit were or may have been switched. (E.g. that when it should (maybe) have been 5327 instead was typed : 5237.)

And when it was about a service number read on an ID disk of an exhumed soldier, of course such an error did not lead to an ID !

Has anybody ever come upon that error ?

Aurel

[Andy Wade]

I regularly transpose letters in words and digitd in a large number. It's one of the probelms with two finger typing.

I did it in that sentence twice, but instead of correcting them I have left them in. The second letter 'd' in ''digits' should have been an 's' which of course is right next to it on the keyboard. I expect that predictive text looks at surrounding letters and predicts which is the most likely based on what follows it.

Now I'm usually very thorough and double or triple check my work before being happy with it, I rarely let a mistake last for more than a couple of minutes. I guess that clerks and their like made lots of mistakes which may or may not have been spotted later. Some are clearly being spotted almost a hundred years later as we're finding quite a few from time to time. The trick being working out what they really meant to put. Florid script in documents just adds to the problem.

[Aurel Sercu]

Thanks, Andy, with a 2 week delay... (Sorry.)

And I always make similar mistakes. I just cannot type the words casualties and soldiers correctly from the start. (Now I made a special effort. Normall the -l- comes before the -a-,, and the -d- before the -l-.)

Thanks you for giving me the opportunity to "re-open" my topic. Well, actually not. But it remieded me of a digit probelm (I mean ... problem ... And ... now I see you have the same problem (!) with that same word problem (!), when you typed ... probelms ! :-)

Anyway, a problem (sic) I had more than 10 years ago. We (the Diggers) found a shred of a rubber groundsheet on which the man had written his service number. Unfortunately we could not find the bottom part.

So I always wondered : what was the whole number ? I was not 100 % sure of the 1st, 3rd and 4th digit. And finally I decided that it was ...

Well, I won't tell you what I decided. As I do not want to prejudice you. If you think you know, then go to this link, and scroll down to halfway, and see if we share the same opinion.

http://www.mausershooters.org/diggers/E/activiteiten/stoffelijkeresten/stamnummers.htm

And if we do then we agree that it was Soldier XXXXX, name on the Menin Gate, who lost his groundsheet. And ... his life on the Boezinge Canal Bank battlefield.

Aurel

P.S. After posting I noticed that I can only see half of the last digit on my monitor screen. Is it the same probelm ... eh ... problem on your screen ?

[Andy Wade]

I'd say it's 4620 rather than 4629 because I think it's only just cropped the very bottom part of the number off, a number '9' would be too displaced for my liking so I think it's a number 0.

Remember this fellow?

Herbert Wood MM

[Aurel Sercu]

Andy,

OK, we agree. I think it is that service number.

So I think I can say we found a piece of the ground sheet of soldier XXXXX. ;-)

And yes, I remember Herbert Wood, but it took me a while to link you to him. After all, my 3 year term memory is no longer what it used to be. (Is 3 years short or long term ? :-) )

Aurel

[daggers]

A fascinating read, having just caught up with it.

As one of the ancients, taught first in the 1930s, we had grey-covered copy-books with examples of part-letters, later full letters, all in copper plate style. Dip pens were standard, Relief nibs allowed, others (the sharper versions) were not. We wrote in the lines below the examples. As we advanced the books began to include proverbs and adages which naturally stuck in the mind and were parodied.

The first ball-pens came later, pricey, and with a reverse thread so that only stationers' shop-assistants (remember them?) could undo them - unless you were a schoolboy. These were frowned on at first until the tide of Biro/Bic held sway.

I later tried to write in an italic script so my hand is now a mixture and I have two ways of forming a capital D (for my surname) and at least two for a lc 'g'.

This morning I signed for two parcels on one of the newish gadgets and could not recognise either of my versions!

One twin son crosses his 7. The other, with same schooling, does not.

D

[Aurel Sercu]

Daggers,

Thanks for sharing your nostalgic (?) feelings.

And you sure must be an ancient ! :-)

Just in case someone might ask, let me anticipate : are the twin sons identical twins ?

Sorry, I know, totally (?) irrelevant ... Just being curious ...

Aurel

[daggers]

Sorry about the ramblings!

No, the sons are not identical and to keep them different we never referred to them as 'the twins' and dressed them differently.

D