User:Snarglefoop/Handwriting Analysis
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Handwriting analysis is the process of -- well, you know -- analyzing handwriting (did I really need to explain that?) with the goal being to either learn something about the writer, or learn something about someone other than the writer, or learn something about something other than the writer, or just plain read what it says. Such an analysis might be undertaken by various specialists in the field, or, in modern times, by a machine of some sort.
A (very) Brief History of Handwriting[edit | edit source]
In the Beginning[edit | edit source]
In the beginning there wasn't any handwriting, because it hadn't been invented yet. (Actually "in the beginning", like as in the beginning beginning, there wasn't any anything, Earth was void and the spirit moved across the waters of the deep and stuff, but we're talking about a much later and less momentous "beginning" than that.)
And then, when it was first invented (handwriting, not the Earth), it was done by using sharp sticks to make scritches in soft clay, or it was done by using hard sticks to make scritches in soft stones, and just a little later it was done by using really hard stones to chip bits out of not quite so hard stones. (A scritch is like a scratch but it can also be a chip or a dent or what happens when you get poked with a sharp stick ... oh, wait, that last one is pitch a fit not a make a scritch, depending on who did the poking and why. Anyway you get the idea.)
Unfortunately pretty much no matter who makes little dents in clay with a sharp stick, they look about the same, so even after writing was invented there still wasn't anything much to analyze for a good long time.
Papyrus[edit | edit source]
Later on, someone invented papyrus ... or, I suppose I should say someone discovered papyrus (unless we're going to go back to the "In The Beginning" stuff again and talk about how God invented papyrus). Anyhow papyrus just kind of grows, and you can just go out and pick it, if you're lucky enough to live in the right part of the world and unlucky enough to live in a swamp. (Which is where it grows.)
The point is that papyrus was the first thing anyone found that they could write on in a sufficiently sensible way that the result could actually be analyzed. However, the discovery of papyrus was only half of what needed to be done.
Finding Something to Write With[edit | edit source]
As we all know from those occasions when we've picked up the phone only to find it's someone calling us with a Very Important Message which includes a Very Important Telephone Number which must be written down Right Now because the caller hasn't got time to talk just now but they want us to call them back at our earliest convenience but no earlier than 4:35 this afternoon, and they're calling from Brazil and the phone number at which they need to be called back contains 35 digits, finding something to write with can be urgent and, when you can't do it, it can be darn annoying. And that was exactly how things stood for the first hundred years or so after the discovery of papyrus. They had all this great stuff to write on and nobody could find anything to write with.
Eventually, though, people found a number of very practical ways to make marks on papyrus. The first thing they found which worked reasonably well was a hot poker. If you heat the tip to a cherry red glow, and if it's a good, sharp poker, it makes a nice, dark, very clear line when drawn across the papyrus. Unfortunately writing more than a few words with such a "pen" tends to result in third degree burns on the hand you're writing with. Consequently very little was written using this method, and what little has survived seems to consist mostly of expletives.
In 1817, Henry David Thoreau invented the wooden "pencil" of the sort they now make in China, and everything changed forever.
A discussion of what, exactly, most people used to write with between the discovery of hot pokers and Thoreau's later invention of the pencil is beyond the scope of this document. (I think it involved using various bits of birds (whence the term chicken scratchings). Wikipedia might have more information.)
Early Handwriting Analysis[edit | edit source]
It wasn't long after the invention of writing on papyrus that someone noticed you could tell something about the author of a letter just by looking at how they wrote it.
For instance, if the letters were cut into the leaf with the sharp point of a dagger, and the "ink" used was kind of dark red and looked suspiciously like somebody's blood, you might guess that the author may have been upset. This was particularly true if the topic involved something emotionally charged, like repayment of a loan.
Gypsies[edit | edit source]
Gypsies make much of their money through fortune telling. Consequently, expanding into the field of handwriting analysis followed naturally.
Up until that time, fortune telling and handwriting analysis were entirely distinct disciplines, and there was no similarity between the practitioners of the two fields. For instance, if someone went to a gypsy, the experience might have gone something like this:
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In contrast, if the lovelorn client had consulted a handwriting analyst, the result would have been entirely different.
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